The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

She might have spoken aloud, save for the small silver sphere which floats above her right shoulder: her official biographer.

  I’ve outlived my enemies. But that’s no excuse for relaxing vigilance.

  Instead, she snaps her fingers, places a call to her lawyers. Instantly—despite the fact that it is 4 a.m. in California—her chief legal officer comes on line. The head-and-shoulders image in the holovolume is system-generated (she can tell the difference), but then she has probably woken him up.

  Everything is different.

  Outside, dull winter presses against the window. Since global warming finally tipped the North Atlantic convection cell, English winters are an Arctic hell. And she has grown to hate the cold; she should have stayed in California.

  “I’ve decided. I’m going into space.” She speaks with utter finality. “I want to see, in person. To be there when the flight takes place.”

  “But—” The lawyer stops, then: “Yes, ma’am. I’ll confirm the arrangements now. Oh, and Happy B—”

  “Good. Augusta out.”

  No one dares to call me Gus anymore.

  But that is the least measure of her success—if it is success. For she has outlived her friends, as well as her enemies. With a lonely decade, maybe two, ahead of her ... if she strictly follows her medics’ conservative, over-protective regimen.

  Her name is Augusta Medora de Lauron (the surname from her seventh husband, which she has kept because she likes it), her personal wealth exceeds anything she ever dreamed of, and today is her 113th birthday.

  OXFORD, 1997

  When she was eight years old, she told her mother that her real name was Gus.

  “Augusta sounds silly,” she announced with great solemnity. “And I’m not silly.”

  She waved a spoon as if for emphasis. Dessert was a banana mashed up with a little milk—some sugar sprinkled on top, for the extra calories—and it was a favourite.

  “Does Augusta sound silly?”

  Her mother—she still remembers this, 105 years later, with a brightness and clarity denied more recent events—turned and stared out of the small, grimy kitchen window. Outside, the darkness of a cold winter’s evening. Mother’s face was lined, though she could not have been more than 30, and she was very thin.

  “You know”—she turned to face her child, sitting at the cracked Formica-topped table (an unforgettable egg-yolk yellow)—“I do believe you’re right, Gus.”

  Gus’s face dimpled in a smile.

  When she had finished her mashed banana, she slid from the chair, and went to fetch her duffel coat while Mother washed up dishes in the big cracked sink. By the time Mother was ready to leave, Gus was already standing by the front door (whose paint was flaking, revealing silver-grey weathered wood: significant in retrospect, natural at the time), her duffel coat buttoned all the way up, her Buzz Lightyear satchel stuffed with books.

  “You’re a good girl, Gus.”

  “You’re a good woman, Mum.”

  Mother bent down and they touched foreheads: their own private gesture which they had performed for as long as Gus could remember.

  “Come along, pumpkin.”

  Gus sighed, but it was a kind of joke: she liked being called pumpkin, and she always had. Even though she was getting a little old for pet names.

  Outside, the streets were cold. Gus walked with her hand in Mother’s, hurrying a little as the bus-stop came into sight.

  There they waited, beneath the sodium-vapour streetlamp, in front of an old council house whose patchy hedge, black beneath the glowing orange light, scarcely concealed the tiny front garden, the discarded bath and broken parts of rusty lawnmower strewn across it. Finally the bus came, only ten minutes late; its pneumatic door wheezed open and Gus and Mother climbed inside.

  On her lap, Mother clutched the Safeway carrier bag she referred to as her “executive briefcase.” Sometimes she would close her eyes, lightly dozing, though tonight she was not so tired.

  Gus counted stops, keeping track of the route—“We’re on the ring road now, Mummy”—as the bus circled the north of Oxford, and turned off into the small science park where Mother worked. They got off at the usual stop, and walked through the dark, empty car park (which in later years Gus would think of as a parking lot) to the locked entrance.

  Why is it always empty, Mum? she had once asked. Because the important people, Mother replied, have all gone home.

  Inside the lobby, it was her favourite security guard—Uncle Eric with the big grey moustache—who signed them in. Her second-favourite was Big Fredo, who talked to Mother in Italian, which Gus did not understand, though she loved to listen to the flowing lyrical words.

  Are we important? she had asked her mother.

  After a pause, Oh, yes, Mother had replied. You, pumpkin, are the most important person of all. That’s why they leave the office building empty, just for you.

  “Hey, Louisa,” said Eric. “Good to know the real workers have arrived.”

  “I guess so. How’s Esther?”

  “Just the same.” A slow shake of the head. “Just the same.”

  “See you later, then.”

  “I’ll be here.” Just as he always said: “Same old same old.”

  Mother hung up her threadbare anorak, took the freshly laundered light-blue work-coat from her carrierbag, and pulled it on. From the cupboard, she dragged out the big old vacuum cleaner, set the mop and bucket aside for later.

  “Come along, pumpkin. Let’s get set up.”

  The wide, gleaming machine room was her domain. Machine room. Gus had learned the name from one of the late-night computer operators, who used to chat with her before the night-shift had been cancelled (Because they finally automated the overnight run, the woman said morosely. Even the back-up routine.)

  The place was clean, always cool, with a crispness to the conditioned air which Gus could almost taste. Sometimes she stuck out her tongue—when there was no adult to see—and tried to lick the dust-free atmosphere itself.

  The big desktop shone an eerie white beneath strong fluorescent light. All around stood row upon row of pale-grey and matte-black rectangular boxes: the Computers (the capital was obvious, whenever Mother talked about them) which kept the business going.

  Gus had learned to program in Logo when she was six years old, on the cracked BBC Acorn at the back of her form-room in school, on a decades-old table bearing the scratched initials of long-forgotten pupils.

  By this time, aged eight, she knew the difference between program and data, between processor and disc. Gus was aware that the boxes discreetly labelled System/38 (that was an old one, battered by now), AS/400 and RS/600 were processor units; the majority of the rest were disc drives. Row upon row of them, like tall refrigerators, stacked inside with spinning discs.

  Once, one of the other cleaning ladies who worked with Mother had unplugged a disc drive—so she could plug in her vacuum cleaner—and the next night the cleaners’ supervisor had arrived and taken her off to one side (“For a quiet word,” he claimed). The woman left in tears; neither Gus nor Mother saw her again.

  Since then, the cleaners had been under strict instructions never, under any circumstances, to venture inside the machine room where the Computers (with a capital C) were kept. But no one had ever changed the lock-code—X and Y together, then 3-2-Z, before turning the dull steel knob in what felt like the wrong direction—so Mother had found the best place of all to keep Gus safe while she worked.

  “Get out your books, pumpkin.”

  “Okay, Mum,” she said as always. “I’ll be good.”

  And then she was alone.

  It was true that she read the books. And that they were a mixture of titles, from War and Peace to G. A. Dickinson’s Algebraic Secrets, which were too advanced for an eight-year-old, though her mother only half-realized this.

  But often Gus would slip down from the operator’s swivel chair, leaving her open books before the consoles, and simply sit cross-legged on the flo
or-tiles, staring at the rows and rows of black and grey boxes. And listening.

  For at night, discs whisper their secrets to those with ears to hear.

  Susurration. A breathing, a soft chaotic overlay of nearly-words, of almost-conversation, as if she eavesdropped upon a salon-full of ghosts from centuries gone by: with everything to gossip of, but no breath to speak.

  Sometimes, they moaned.

  But mostly the indeterminate sounds formed overlapping whispers from beyond, whose words would never coalesce into meaning, yet whose message would haunt Gus-who-grew-into-Augusta forever.

  ASHLEY COMBE, 1843

  Upon the wall, a gaslight hisses, incandescent. Ada lies back upon the chaise-longue, dabbing a dampened cloth on her too-pale forehead. On the dainty table beside her lies a small pile of notes scribbled in black ink, with loops and scrawls surrounding the strange equations, and scraps of verse—forbidden verse!—in her scratchy handwriting.

  And, on one of those sheets, something new: an ink-drawn table with numbered, imperative steps of logic. Slow, for a person to work through those iterative commands: yet in her mind, burning with fever, it is Babbage’s gleaming Engine which is alive with the pseudo-thoughts she has created; it is polished cogs and shining rods which click and spin more surely than too-weak mortal flesh, undermined by moral frailty or feminine weakness.

  The Pattern beneath the world ...

  Is she mad? Can she, a mere woman, be the first to have deduced the true possibilities of Babbage’s calculating engines? Can she, for all her disadvantages, her cursed beginnings, truly perceive the power of mechanical minds?

  For she has written the devil’s code, logical steps which will execute within the power-realm of brass and steel, in stately sequence as exact and elegant as an evening’s programme at a debutante’s ball.

  “But I am the Silver Lady ...” Her whispered voice trembles.

  For the laudanum’s magic is upon her.

  In her vision, she herself is Babbage’s automaton: the scandalous Silver Lady with which he entertains his rich and famous guests. That Silver Lady of which “Lady M” complained in an open public letter: an artificial woman whose garments were too diaphanous for polite society.

  But in Ada’s dreams, it is she who is semi-clothed, with Babbage’s rough hands upon her.

  O, my father! It is your Dark Nature which calls to me ...

  For all that her mother tried to whip the influence from Ada, Lord Byron’s spirit is within her core, tempted by all that is lascivious and compelling.

  Then a voice penetrates the heavy dream—“O, my beloved Beauty”—and for a moment she thinks it is William, her too-tame ingenuous husband. But no, he is away in London; it is her dear friend, John Crosse, who takes her hand and presses it to his lips.

  “Sweet, my prince ...”

  His hands are within her garments.

  But her mind’s eye is filled with other sights: coils and bubbling vessels, the strange electromagnetic experiments of Crosse and Faraday, the very real mysteries they have explored. And this man, in whose arms she moans, is the son of Faust: for his father Andrew has generated life from electricity. Society is ablaze with the news. After leaving his electrolytic apparatus bubbling for three weeks, he has found tiny animalcules on one of the electrodes. Life, from base inanimate matter.

  And Faraday, her other hero in this scientific age, has Ada’s portrait hanging prominently on his wall. Does she inspire him, even as his rough-hewn manner and sparkling intellect fire her imagination?

  Inside, she burns.

  Crosse moves upon her—“My darling, my Queen of Engines, Enchantress of Numbers”—repeating the title which Babbage gave her, and has now become their own.

  She cries out with pleasure, not caring if the servants overhear.

  “My good Doctor, creator of Life, bearer of Fire—”

  A dark-blue glass bottle, lying on its side upon the rug, has become unstoppered. Precious drops of liquid escape, evaporate. Their heady vapour incenses the wild, drugged atmosphere which already pervades the drawing-room.

  The Pattern ...

  Yet there is unease beneath her happy, chaotic delirium, as though Ada already senses the new life quickening inside her.

  But she is captivated by logical symbols, drawn in fire within her mind, enraptured by the notion that she—Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, eternally cursed daughter of mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Lord Byron (whose incestuous liaison with his own sister Augusta, after whom Ada in all innocence was christened, is the scandal which drove him finally from England)—has been vouchsafed a vision both divine and mad, of gleaming polished power beyond the strict confining world, and she cries out as she pulls her scientific lover to her sinful bosom once more.

  OXFORD, 1998

  At the age of nine, Gus was still too young to travel to the library by herself—“Not in these godforsaken days,” as Mrs. Arrowsmith who lived next door would say—although, once they were there, Mother would let Gus roam among the bookshelves without supervision.

  Sometimes, if Mother was very tired, they would walk from home out to the Park & Ride car park, where they could pretend they had left their car (the one they didn’t own, that didn’t exist) so that they could ride the bus for free. (Was there some kind of ticket Mother should have shown? Gus would wonder later, when she was older, whether there had been a particular, charitable driver.) Most times, though, they caught the normal bus or simply walked.

  Once in the library, Mother would stay in the reading-room, among the reference books and periodicals, and sit drowsing in the warm surroundings.

  One October night, she regarded the pale fog thickening outside the windows—it was 4 p.m. on a Saturday, and she was not working tonight: there was no place to go—and thought about home, of sun-drenched hills and the clamour of noisy, cheerful neighbours, and wondered again why she had ever come to this cold country.

  In front of her, this week’s New Scientist was open. She flicked through it, barely understanding what she read. Sometimes she tried to read Nature, a real scientific journal which the library dutifully stocked. None of it made sense, and yet if she half-drowsed, a strangely relaxing sensation of wonder settled over her like a blanket.

  This night, she craned her head to catch sight of her daughter—there, lost in a world of her own, wandering among books. Gus would pick enough to fill the limit on both their library cards.

  If only I had more time—

  But the Catherine Cookson would do her, Louisa, for a few weeks. She barely had the energy to read a page or two, last thing at night, before turning out the light and sliding into sleep in her narrow, lonely bed.

  Sometimes, Louisa glanced over the titles which Gus had picked. Once, she had tried to read a book by someone called George Eliot—knowing that the writer had been a woman, writing when only men could call professions their own—but the convoluted 19th-century English was difficult. There was a man in the story, who was talented and successful, but eventually strayed in society as he was overtaken by irrational desires for a Jewess, finally taking the socially disastrous step of converting to her religion. But, it turned out, the man’s mother (though she had appeared “true English”) had been a Jewish actress, and the burning desires were his blood’s true nature coming out—

  She had thrown the hideous book aside, disturbed for more reasons than she could name, and considered hiding the book where Gus could not read it. But then, Gus was sensible enough not to be swayed by the half-rationalized bigotry of another century.

  There were Italian novels, and some Spanish ones—easy enough to read—but Louisa steered clear of them. They stirred thoughts of the home she had left 15 years ago, and could never return to.

  She would stick to her Catherine Cooksons and her Danielle Steeles, written in English simple enough for her to understand, and forget the rest.

  I’m so tired—

  Then someone was shaking her shoulder.

  “Tim
e to go home,” the young man said, kindly. “Your little girl’s waiting.”

  And his concerned thoughts were obvious: You should eat more, too.

  In the reading-room’s doorway, Gus was standing with her arms full of books. She grinned at her mother, showing the gap in the front where two neighbouring milk teeth had dropped out within days of each other.

  “Sorry.” Rubbing her eyes, she smiled at Gus. “Got your books, pumpkin?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  She took the books from Gus’s arms and carried them to the counter, where the librarian could scan them through.

  “Hmm. Abbott’s Flatland.” He stamped the due-date inside. “Not bad. But I don’t know this Pickover chap. Surfing through Hyperspace. Is that good?”

  He looked up at Louisa, but it was Gus who answered: “It’s not bad. I like the stories.”

  Since it was a nonfiction book, the librarian chuckled, and winked at Louisa as though they were sharing a joke. But there were stories inside, as well as strange science; Louisa had looked over Gus’s shoulder the last time she had borrowed the book.

  “Come on, pumpkin. Time to go home.”

  The young librarian watched them as they left.

  Later, on the bus ride home, Gus tugged at Mother’s sleeve and said: “Why don’t you marry him?”

  Mother’s face froze. “I’m sorry?”

  Gus knew the one topic she could never ask—would never get an answer on—was the subject of her father. But this was different.

  “The man at the library. He likes you.”

  For a moment, Mother was speechless. Then she shook her head, smiling sadly. “Oh, no, Gus. I’m not good enough for him.”

  “But Mummy, you’re—”

  “No, I’m not.” Silence, then: “But you ... You’re the most important person in the world, little pumpkin.”

  And Gus, with a child’s intuition, kept silent for the rest of the journey. She was tempted to open one of her storybooks—there was an old one with a bright yellow cover, Time is the Simplest Thing, and she’d read the first two pages inside the library, with the pink telepathic alien blob, and saw immediately that it was brilliant—but she knew from experience that trying to read inside a moving bus would make her sick.