The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Finally, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it direct into his visual field: there’s an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again—but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches fire—and he’s down.

  Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then—

  Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her Equerry has designed for her. It’s a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of indium. It glitters with the blue and violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and, in any event, certain styles—skirts, for example—are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a crown. And there’s a cat sleeping on the back of her throne.

  The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. “If you need anything, please say,” she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor—a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower—and waits to be noticed.

  “Doctor Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay.”

  Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young—her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face—but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. “I am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows: but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except in the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.

  “Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: a ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. “You must be tired: working a ship all by yourself is exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. “And two years is nearly unprecedented.”

  “Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. “Your labors have been fruitful, I trust.”

  She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier. ...” a momentary grin. “This isn’t the wild west, is it?”

  “Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later. “My apologies, please accept that while I mean no insult. I merely mean that while you say your goal is to provide the rule of Law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice.”

  The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree: I can’t sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn’t it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they’re close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to space, than any earthbound one.” A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.

  Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels: the crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. “There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is Law that we can establish by analyzing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study his works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?”

  “Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claim-jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here: how she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation system. She is the queen—the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure—even the Pentagon’s infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s firewall. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity; she’s by no means the first upload or partial, but she’s the first-gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brains throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the rectitude of her vision.

  The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.

  “You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”

  It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.

  “Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree—

  “Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.

  “Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.

  Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes.”

  Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.

  He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”

  Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”

  “What? From the aliens?”

  The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork. We’ve known for years that there’s a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we’re just getting spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io—there is a purpose to all this activity.”

  Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a reply?”

  “No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to realtime
. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise.”

  The cat yawns, then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says, “and you’re it. There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian. I don’t suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?”

  In Paradise

  BRUCE STERLING

  One of the most powerful and innovative new talents to enter SF in the past few decades, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976. By the end of the ’80s, he had established himself, with a series of stories set in his exotic “Shaper/Mechanist” future, with novels such as the complex and Stapeldonian Schismatrix and the well-received Islands in the Net (as well as with his editing of the influential anthology Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology and the infamous critical magazine Cheap Truth), as perhaps the prime driving force behind the revolutionary “Cyberpunk” movement in science fiction, and also as one of the best new hard science writers to enter the field in some time. His other books include a critically acclaimed nonfiction study of First Amendment issues in the world of computer networking, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, the novels The Artificial Kid, Involution Ocean, Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, and Distraction, a novel in collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, and the landmark collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. His most recent books include the omnibus collection (it contains the novel Schismatrix as well as most of his Shaper/Mechanist stories) Schismatrix Plus, a new collection, A Good Old-Fashioned Future, and a new novel, Zeitgeist. Upcoming is a nonfiction study of the future, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. His story “Bicycle Repairman” earned him a long-overdue Hugo in 1997, and he won another Hugo in 1997 for his story “Taklamakan.” His stories have appeared in our First through Eighth, Eleventh, Fourteenth, and Sixteenth Annual Collections. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

  In the sly and deceptively quiet story that follows, he offers us a postmodern romance, quirky, bittersweet—and surprising.

  The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.

  Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

  The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.

  The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.

  The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.

  The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell phone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.

  “Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”

  She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “Habla espanol, señorita?” No such luck.

  He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.

  “It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leapt to life with an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.

  She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.

  She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.

  Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.

  On his leisurely way out—whoa, there was Miss Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple of off-duty cops.

  Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.

  He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of him.

  “My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes are like two black diamonds.”

  She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.

  Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls around your throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally smitten with you. What are you like under that big baggy coat? Do I dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your knees!”

  “Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.

  “Because I’m looking at you right now. And after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.” Felix felt a chill. “Hey, wait a minute—you don’t speak English, do you?”

  “No, I don’t speak English—but my telephone does.”

  “It does?”

  “It’s a very new telephone. It’s from Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a foreign country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”

  “That was a figure of speech,” said Felix, though his bank account was, in point of fact, looking considerably healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the million dollars,” he said. “I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my blood just to buy you petunias.”

  “You must be a famous poet,” the phone said dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”

  Felix had no idea what Farsi was—but he was way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his soul were shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on your smile.”

  “In my family, the women never smile.”

  Felix had no idea what to say to that, so there
was a hissing silence.

  “Are you a spy? How did you get my phone number?”

  “I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from your phone.”

  “Then I know you. You must be that tall foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”

  “Look outside the store. See me on the bench?” She turned where she stood, and he waved his fingertips. “That’s right, it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through with this. You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and buy you a wedding ring.”

  “Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof glass. “Yes, I do see you. I remember you.”

  She was looking straight at him. Their eyes met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his spine. “You are looking straight at me.”

  “You’re very handsome.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with eager phone support was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed with limos and videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat, sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He sneaked into the women’s restroom—they never put videocams there, due to the complaints—and he left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of the hotel and into his car.

  They couldn’t speak together without their phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly advantageous, as further discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always complaining that he should open up and relate—“You’re a plumber,” she would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is a plumber supposed to be?”—the new woman in his life had needs that were very straightforward. She liked to walk in parks without a police escort. She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern ethnic groceries. And she liked to make love to him. She was nineteen years old, and the willing sacrifice of her chastity had really burned the bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what went inside where, she was in the mood to tame the demon. She had big, jagged, sobbing, alarming, romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and clutching-and-clawing.