The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “OK. But if she’s not genuine ...”

  My aide overheard money changing hands, and it had modelled the situation well enough to know how I’d wish, always, to respond. “Move now,” it whispered in my ear. I complied without hesitation; 18 months before, I’d pavloved myself into swift obedience, with all the pain and nausea modern chemistry could induce. The aide couldn’t puppet my limbs—I couldn’t afford the elaborate surgery—but it overlaid movement cues on my vision, a system I’d adapted from off-the-shelf choreography software, and I strode out of the bushes, right up to the motorboat.

  The customer was outraged. “What is this?”

  I turned to Holder. “You want to fuck him first, Jake? I’ll hold him down.” There were things I didn’t trust the aide to control; it set the boundaries, but it was better to let me improvise a little, and then treat my actions as one more part of the environment.

  After a moment of stunned silence, Holder said icily, “I’ve never seen this prick before in my life.” He’d been speechless for a little too long, though, to inspire any loyalty from a stranger; as he reached for his weapon, the customer backed away, then turned and fled.

  Holder walked towards me slowly, gun outstretched. “What’s your game? Are you after her? Is that it?” His implants were mapping my body—actively, since there was no need for stealth—but I’d tailed him for hours in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew him like an architectural plan. Over the starlit grey of his form, it overlaid a schematic, flaying him down to brain, nerves, and implants. A swarm of blue fireflies flickered into life in his motor cortex, prefiguring a peculiar shrug of the shoulders with no obvious connection to his trigger finger; before they’d reached the intensity that would signal his implants to radio the gun, my aide said “Duck.”

  The shot was silent, but as I straightened up again I could smell the propellant. I gave up thinking and followed the dance steps. As Holder strode forward and swung the gun towards me, I turned sideways, grabbed his right hand, then punched him hard, repeatedly, in the implant on the side of his neck. He was a fetishist, so he’d chosen bulky packages, intentionally visible through the skin. They were not hard-edged, and they were not inflexible—he wasn’t that masochistic—but once you sufficiently compressed even the softest biocompatible foam, it might as well have been a lump of wood. While I hammered the wood into the muscles of his neck, I twisted his forearm upwards. He dropped the gun; I put my foot on it and slid it back towards the bushes.

  In ultrasound, I saw blood pooling around his implant. I paused while the pressure built up, then I hit him again and the swelling burst like a giant blister. He sagged to his knees, bellowing with pain. I took the knife from my back pocket and held it to his throat.

  I made Holder take off his belt, and I used it to bind his hands behind his back. I led him to the motorboat, and when the two of us were onboard, I suggested that he give it the necessary instructions. He was sullen but co-operative. I didn’t feel anything; part of me still insisted that the transaction I’d caught him in was a hoax, and that there’d be nothing on the barge that couldn’t be found in Baton Rouge.

  The barge was old, wooden, smelling of preservatives and unvanquished rot. There were dirty plastic panes in the cabin windows, but all I could see in them was a reflected sheen. As we crossed the deck, I kept Holder intimately close, hoping that if there was an armed security system it wouldn’t risk putting the bullet through both of us.

  At the cabin door, he said resignedly, “Don’t treat her badly.” My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my mouth to stifle an involuntary sob.

  I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but shadows. I called out “Lights!” and two responded, in the ceiling and by the bed. Helen was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She looked up and saw me, then began to emit a horrified keening noise.

  I pressed the blade against Holder’s throat. “Open those things!”

  “The shackles?”

  “Yes!”

  “I can’t. They’re not smart; they’re just welded shut.”

  “Where are your tools?”

  He hesitated. “I’ve got some wrenches in the truck. All the rest is back in town.”

  I looked around the cabin, then I led him into a corner and told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the bed.

  “Ssh. We’ll get you out of here.” Helen fell silent. I touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didn’t flinch, but she stared back at me, disbelieving. “We’ll get you out.” The timber bedposts were thicker than my arms, the links of the chains wide as my thumb. I wasn’t going to snap any part of this with my bare hands.

  Helen’s expression changed: I was real, she was not hallucinating. She said dully, “I thought you’d given up on me. Woke one of the backups. Started again.”

  I said, “I’d never give up on you.”

  “Are you sure?” She searched my face. “Is this the edge of what’s possible? Is this the worst it can get?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that.

  I said, “You remember how to go numb, for a shedding?”

  She gave me a faint, triumphant smile. “Absolutely.” She’d had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but she’d always had the power to cut herself off from her body’s senses.

  “Do you want to do it now? Leave all this behind?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be safe soon. I promise you.”

  “I believe you.” Her eyes rolled up.

  I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.

  Francine and I had both carried spare bodies, and clothes, in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from domestic flights, so Helen and I drove along the interstate, up towards Washington D.C., where Francine would meet us. We could claim asylum at the Swiss embassy; Isabelle had already set the machinery in motion.

  Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me as if with a stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from Alabama into Georgia, she began to open up. She told me a little of how she’d hitchhiked from state to state, finding casual jobs that paid e-cash and needed no social security number, let alone biometric ID. “Fruit picking was the best.”

  She’d made friends along the way, and confided her nature to those she thought she could trust. She still wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been betrayed. Holder had found her in a transient’s camp under a bridge, and someone must have told him exactly where to look, but it was always possible that she’d been recognized by a casual acquaintance who’d seen her face in the media years before. Francine and I had never publicized her disappearance, never put up flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the danger worse.

  On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas, we drove in near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields strewn with flowers, and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she needed the most: just safety, and peace.

  As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to speak.

  “There’s something I’ve never told you,” I said. “Something that happened to me when I was young.”

  Helen smiled. “Don’t tell me you ran away from the farm? Got tired of milking, and joined the circus?”

  I shook my head. “I was never adventurous. It was just a little thing.” I told her about the kitchen hand.

  She pondered the story for a while. “And that’s why you built the Qusp? That’s why you made me? In the end, it all comes down to that man in the alley?” She sounded more bewildered than angry.

  I bowed my head. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” she demanded. “Are you sorry that I was ever born?”

  “No, but—”

  “You didn’t put me on that boat. Holder did that.”

  I said, “I brought you into a world with people like him. What I made you, made you a target.”

  “And if I’d been flesh and blood?” she said. “Do you think there aren’t people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do you honestly believe that if you’
d had an organic child, there would have been no chance at all that she’d have run away?”

  I started weeping. “I don’t know. I’m just sorry I hurt you.”

  Helen said, “I don’t blame you for what you did. And I understand it better now. You saw a spark of good in yourself, and you wanted to cup your hands around it, protect it, make it stronger. I understand that. I’m not that spark, but that doesn’t matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are, and I’m glad of that. I’m glad you gave me that.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Do you think I’d feel better, here and now, just because some other version of me handled the same situations better?” She smiled. “Knowing that other people are having a good time isn’t much of a consolation to anyone.”

  I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my attention to a booking it had made in a motel a few kilometres ahead.

  Helen said, “I’ve had time to think about a lot of things. Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai are part of the human race. And what I have is something almost every person who’s ever lived thought they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we don’t—so in the long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather we tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole identities.”

  I was silent for a while. “So what are your plans, now?”

  “I need an education.”

  “What do you want to study?”

  “I’m not sure yet. A million different things. But in the long run, I know what I want to do.”

  “Yeah?” The car turned off the highway, heading for the motel.

  “You made a start,” she said, “but it’s not enough. There are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp hasn’t been invented yet—and the way things stand, there’ll always be branches without it. What’s the point in us having this thing, if we don’t share it? All those people deserve to have the power to make their own choices.”

  “Travel between the branches isn’t a simple problem,” I explained gently. “That would be orders of magnitude harder than the Qusp.”

  Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners of her mouth took on the stubborn set I recognized as the precursor to a thousand smaller victories.

  She said, “Give me time, Dad. Give me time.”

  Slow Life

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the twenty-two years that followed established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” In the last few years, he’s won back-to-back Hugo Awards—he won the Hugo in 1999 for his story “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” and followed it up in 2000 with another Hugo Award for his story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” and yet another Hugo Award in 2001 for his story “The Dog Said Bow-wow.” His other books include his first novel, In the Drift, which was published in 1985, a novella-length book, Griffin’s Egg, 1987’s popular novel Vacuum Flowers, a critically acclaimed fantasy novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (a rare distinction!), and Jack Faust, a sly reworking of the Faust legend that explores the unexpected impact of technology on society. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time (a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers), Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, and Tales of Old Earth. He’s also published a collection of critical articles, The Postmodern Archipelago, and a book-length interview Being Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is a major new novel, Bones of the Earth, and coming up are several new collections. He’s had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth through Nineteenth Annual Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter (Sean left for college). He has a website at www.michaelswanwick.com.

  Explorers should expect the unexpected, but, as this suspenseful adventure to Titan shows us, sometimes you encounter something a little more unexpected than usual ...

  “It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was our turn to make history now.”

  —The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien

  The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.

  Now the journey could begin.

  It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.

  Down it drifted.

  At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.

  It fell.

  Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per second.

  At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and continued its downward flight.

  As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two and a half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected to reach the ground.

  It was, however, falling toward the equatorial highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting the surface.

  Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag upward, and snared the raindrop.

  “Gotcha!” Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.

  She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet cam could read the bar code in the corner, and said, “One raindrop.” Then she popped it into her collecting box.

  Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happiest. Somebody would spend a year studying this one little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag 64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution in planetary science. The thought of it filled her with joy.

  Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. “I’m singing in the rain.” She threw out her arms and spun around. “Just singing in the rain!”

  “Uh ... O’Brien?” Alan Greene said from the Clement. “Are you all right?”

  “Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I’m ... some-thing again.”

  “Oh, leave her alone.” Consuelo Hong said with sour good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane simply boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses. “Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear it?”

  “If you say so,” Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in the Clement, overseeing the expedition and minding the website. It was a comfortable gig—he wouldn’t be sleeping in his suit or surviving on recycled water and energy stix—and he didn’t think the others knew how much he hated it.

  “What
’s next on the schedule?” Lizzie asked.

  “Um ... well, there’s still the robot turbot to be released. How’s that going, Hong?”

  “Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at the lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going over the harness checklist.”

  “Roger that.”

  “And while you’re doing that, I’ve got today’s voice-posts from the Web cued up.”

  Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry. By NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all web-casts. Officially, they were delighted to share their experiences with the public. But the VoiceWeb (privately, Lizzie thought of it as the Illiternet) made them accessible to people who lacked even the minimal intellectual skills needed to handle a keyboard.

  “Let me remind you that we’re on open circuit here, so anything you say will go into my reply. You’re certainly welcome to chime in at any time. But each question-and-response is transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line, we’ll have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Consuelo grumbled.

  “We’ve done this before,” Lizzie reminded him.

  “Okay. Here’s the first one.”

  “Uh, hi, this is BladeNinja43. I was wondering just what it is that you guys are hoping to discover out there.”

  “That’s an extremely good question,” Alan lied. “And the answer is: We don’t know! This is a voyage of discovery, and we’re engaged in what’s called ‘pure science.’ Now, time and time again, the purest research has turned out to be extremely profitable. But we’re not looking that far ahead. We’re just hoping to find something absolutely unexpected.”

  “My God, you’re slick,” Lizzie marveled.

  “I’m going to edit that from the tape,” Alan said cheerily. “Next up.”