The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  A couple of miles east of the big downtown interchange, traffic began backing up. Maybe an accident ahead, maybe a roadblock. I told the Toshiba to get off the freeway.

  Slipping through roadblocks is scary and calls for a lot of hard work. I knew that I probably could fool any kind of software at a roadblock and certainly any human cop, but why bother if you don’t have to?

  I asked the car where I was.

  The screen lit up. ALAMEDA NEAR BANNING, it said. A long walk to Pershing Square. I had the car drop me at Spring Street. “Pick me up at eighteen-thirty hours,” I told it. “Corner of—umm—Sixth and Hill.” It went away to park itself and I headed for the square to peddle some pardons.

  * * *

  It isn’t hard for a good pardoner to find buyers. You can see it in their eyes: the tightly controlled anger, the smoldering resentment. And something else, something intangible, a certain sense of having a shred or two of inner integrity left that tells you right away, Here’s somebody willing to risk a lot to regain some measure of freedom. I was in business within 15 minutes.

  The first one was an aging-surfer sort, barrel chest and that sun-bleached look. The Entities haven’t allowed surfing for 10, 15 years—they’ve got their plankton seines just offshore from Santa Barbara to San Diego, gulping in the marine nutrients they have to have, and any beach boy who tried to take a whack at the waves out there would be chewed right up. But this guy must have been one hell of a performer in his day. The way he moved through the park, making little balancing moves as if he needed to compensate for the irregularities of the earth’s rotation, you could see how he would have been in the water. Sat down next to me, began working on his lunch. Thick forearms, gnarled hands. A wall laborer. Muscles knotting in his cheeks: the anger forever simmering just below boil.

  I got him talking after a while. A surfer, yes. Lost in the faraway and gone. He began sighing to me about legendary beaches where the waves were tubes and they came pumping end to end. “Trestle Beach,” he murmured. “That’s north of San Onofre. You used to sneak through Camp Pendleton. Sometimes the Marines would open fire, just warning shots. Or Hollister Ranch, up by Santa Barbara.” His blue eyes got misty. “Huntington Beach. Oxnard. I got everywhere, man.” He flexed his huge fingers. “Now these fucking Entity hodads own the shore. Can you believe it? They own it. And I’m pulling wall, my second time around, seven days a week next ten years.”

  “Ten?” I said. “That’s a shitty deal.”

  “You know anyone who doesn’t have a shitty deal?”

  “Some,” I said. “They buy out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It can be done.”

  A careful look. You never know who might be a borgmann. Those stinking collaborators are everywhere.

  “Can it?”

  “All it takes is money,” I said.

  “And a pardoner.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One you can trust.”

  I shrugged. “You’ve got to go on faith, man.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Then, after a while: “I heard of a guy, he bought a three-year pardon and wall passage thrown in. Went up north, caught a krill trawler, wound up in Australia, on the Reef. Nobody’s ever going to find him there. He’s out of the system. Right out of the fucking system. What do you think that cost?”

  “About twenty grand,” I said.

  “Hey, that’s a sharp guess!”

  “No guess.”

  “Oh?” Another careful look. “You don’t sound local.”

  “I’m not. Just visiting.”

  “That’s still the price? Twenty grand?”

  “I can’t do anything about supplying krill trawlers. You’d be on your own once you were outside the wall.”

  “Twenty grand just to get through the wall?”

  “And a seven-year labor exemption.”

  “I pulled ten,” he said.

  “I can’t get you ten. It’s not in the configuration, you follow? But seven would work. You could get so far, in seven, that they’d lose you. You could goddamn swim to Australia. Come in low, below Sydney, no seines there.”

  “You know a hell of a lot.”

  “My business to know,” I said. “You want me to run an asset check on you?”

  “I’m worth seventeen five. Fifteen hundred real, the rest collat. What can I get for seventeen five?”

  “Just what I said. Through the wall and seven years’ exemption.”

  “A bargain rate, hey?”

  “I take what I can get,” I said. “Give me your wrist. And don’t worry. This part is read only.”

  I keyed his data implant and patched mine in. He had $1500 in the bank and a collateral rating of 16 thou, exactly as he had claimed. We eyed each other very carefully now. As I said, you never know who the borgmanns are.

  “You can do it right here in the park?” he asked.

  “You bet. Lean back, close your eyes, make like you’re snoozing in the sun. The deal is that I take a thousand of the cash now and you transfer five thou of the collateral bucks to me, straight labor-debenture deal. When you get through the wall, I get the other five hundred cash and five thou more on sweat security. The rest you pay off at three thou a year, plus interest, wherever you are, quarterly key-ins. I’ll program the whole thing, including beep reminders on payment dates. It’s up to you to make your travel arrangements, remember. I can do pardons and wall transits, but I’m not a goddamn travel agent. Are we on?”

  He put his head back and closed his eyes.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  It was finger-tip stuff, straight circuit emulation, my standard hack. I picked up all his identification codes, carried them into central, found his records. He seemed real, nothing more or less than he had claimed. Sure enough, he had drawn a lulu of a labor tax, ten years on the wall. I wrote him a pardon good for the first seven of that. Had to leave the final three on the books, for purely technical reasons, but the computers weren’t going to be able to find him by then. I gave him a wall-transit pass, too, which meant writing in a new skills class for him, programmer third grade. He didn’t think like a programmer and he didn’t look like a programmer, but the wall software wasn’t going to figure that out. Now I had made him a member of the human elite, the relative handful of us who are free to go in and out of the walled cities as we wish. In return for these little favors, I signed over his entire life’s savings to various accounts of mine, payable as arranged, part now, part later. He wasn’t worth a nickel anymore, but he was a free man. That’s not such a terrible trade-off.

  Oh, and the pardon was a valid one. I had decided not to write any stiffs while I was in Los Angeles. A kind of sentimental atonement, you might say, for the job I had done on that woman all those years back.

  You absolutely have to write stiffs once in a while, you understand. So that you don’t look too good, so that you don’t give the Entities reason to hunt you down. Just as you have to ration the number of pardons you do. I didn’t have to be writing pardons at all, of course. I could have just authorized the system to pay me so much a year, 50 thou, 100 thou, and taken it easy forever. But where’s the challenge in that?

  So I write pardons, but no more than I need to cover my expenses, and I deliberately fudge some of them, making myself look as incompetent as the rest, so the Entities don’t have a reason to begin trying to track the identifying marks of my work. My conscience hasn’t been too sore about that. It’s a matter of survival, after all. And most other pardoners are out-and-out frauds, you know. At least with me, you stand a better-than-even chance of getting what you’re paying for.

  * * *

  The next one was a tiny Japanese woman, the classic style, sleek, fragile, doll-like. Crying in big wild gulps that I thought might break her in half, while a gray-haired older man in a shabby business suit—her grandfather, you’d guess—was trying to comfort her. Public crying is a good indicator of Entity trouble. “Maybe I can help,” I said, and they were bot
h so distraught that they didn’t even bother to be suspicious.

  He was her father-in-law, not her grandfather. The husband was dead, killed by burglars the year before. There were two small kids. Now she had received her new labor-tax ticket. She had been afraid they were going to send her out to work on the wall, which, of course, wasn’t likely to happen: The assignments are pretty random, but they usually aren’t crazy, and what use would a 90-pound woman be in hauling stone blocks around? The father-in-law had some friends who were in the know, and they managed to bring up the hidden encoding on her ticket. The computers hadn’t sent her to the wall, no. They had sent her to Area Five. And they had classified her T.T.D. classification.

  “The wall would have been better,” the old man said. “They’d see right away she wasn’t strong enough for heavy work, and they’d find something else, something she could do. But Area Five? Who ever comes back from that?”

  “You know what Area Five is?” I said.

  “The medical-experiment place. And this mark here, T.T.D. I know what that stands for, too.”

  She began to moan again. I couldn’t blame her. T.T.D. means Test to Destruction. The Entities want to find out how much work we can really do, and they feel that the only reliable way to discover that is to put us through tests that show where the physical limits are.

  “I will die,” she wailed. “My babies! My babies!”

  “Do you know what a pardoner is?” I asked the father-in-law.

  A quick, excited response: sharp intake of breath, eyes going bright, head nodding vehemently. Just as quickly, the excitement faded, giving way to bleakness, helplessness, despair.

  “They all cheat you,” he said.

  “Not all.”

  “Who can say? They take your money, they give you nothing.”

  “You know that isn’t true. Everybody can tell you stories of pardons that came through.”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” the old man said. The woman sobbed quietly. “You know of such a person?”

  “For three thousand dollars,” I said, “I can take the T.T.D. off her ticket. For five more, I can write an exemption from service good until her children are in high school.”

  Sentimental me. A 50 percent discount, and I hadn’t even run an asset check. For all I knew, the father-in-law was a millionaire. But no; he’d have been off cutting a pardon for her, then, and not sitting around like this in Pershing Square.

  He gave me a long, deep, appraising look—peasant shrewdness coming to the surface.

  “How can we be sure of that?” he asked.

  I might have told him that I was the king of my profession, the best of all pardoners, a genius hacker with the truly magic touch who could slip into any computer ever designed and make it dance to my tune. Which would have been nothing more than the truth. But all I said was that he’d have to make up his own mind, that I couldn’t offer any affidavits or guarantees, that I was available if he wanted me and otherwise it was all the same to me if she preferred to stick with her T.T.D. ticket. They went off and conferred for a couple of minutes. When they came back, he silently rolled up his sleeve and presented his implant to me. I keyed his credit balance: 30 thou or so, not bad. I transferred eight of it to my accounts, half to Seattle, the rest to Los Angeles. Then I took her wrist, which was about two of my fingers thick, and got into her implant and wrote her the pardon that would save her life. Just to be certain, I ran a double validation check on it. It’s always possible to stiff a customer unintentionally, though I’ve never done it. But I didn’t want this particular one to be my first.

  “Go on,” I said. “Home. Your kids are waiting for their lunch.”

  Her eyes glowed. “If I could only thank you somehow——”

  “I’ve already banked my fee. Go. If you ever see me again, don’t say hello.”

  “This will work?” the old man asked.

  “You say you have friends who know things. Wait seven days, then tell the data bank that she’s lost her ticket. When you get the new one, ask your pals to decode it for you. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  I don’t think he believed me. I think he was more than half sure I had swindled him out of one fourth of his life’s savings, and I could see the hatred in his eyes. But that was his problem. In a week he’d find out that I really had saved his daughter-in-law’s life, and then he’d rush down to the square to tell me how sorry he was that he had had such terrible feeling toward me. Only by then I’d be somewhere else, far away.

  They shuffled out the east side of the park, pausing a couple of times to peer over their shoulders at me as if they thought I was going to transform them into pillars of salt the moment their backs were turned. Then they were gone.

  I’d earned enough now to get me through the week I planned to spend in L.A. But I stuck around anyway, hoping for a little more. My mistake.

  * * *

  This one was Mr. Invisible, the sort of man you’d never notice in a crowd, gray on gray, thinning hair, mild, bland, apologetic smile. But his eyes had a shine. I forget whether he started talking first to me, or me to him, but pretty soon we were jockeying around trying to find out things about each other. He told me he was from Silver Lake. I gave him a blank look. How in hell am I supposed to know all the zillion L.A. neighborhoods? Said that he had come down here to see someone at the big government H.Q. on Figueroa Street. All right: probably an appeals case. I sensed a customer.

  Then he wanted to know where I was from. Santa Monica? West L.A.? Something in my accent, I guess. “I’m a traveling man,” I said. “Hate to stay in one place.” True enough. I need to hack or I go crazy; if I did all my hacking in just one city, I’d be virtually begging them to slap a trace on me sooner or later, and that would be the end. I didn’t tell him any of that. “Came in from Utah last night. Wyoming before that.” Not true, either one. “Maybe New York next.” He looked at me as if I’d said I was planning a voyage to the moon. People out here, they don’t go East a lot. These days, most people don’t go anywhere.

  Now he knew that I had wall-transit clearance, or else that I had some way of getting it when I wanted it. That was what he was looking to find out. In no time at all, we were down to basics.

  He said he had drawn a new ticket, six years at the salt-field-reclamation site out back of Mono Lake. People die like May flies out there. What he wanted was a transfer to something softer, like Operations and Maintenance, and it had to be within the walls, preferably in one of the districts out by the ocean, where the air is cool and clear. I quoted him a price and he accepted without a quiver.

  “Let’s have your wrist,” I said.

  He held out his right hand, palm upward. His implant access was a pale-yellow plaque, mounted in the usual place but rounder than the standard kind and of a slightly smoother texture. I didn’t see any great significance in that. As I had done maybe 1000 times before, I put my own arm over his, wrist to wrist, access to access. Our biocomputers made contact, and instantly I knew I was in trouble.

  Human beings have been carrying biochip-based computers in their bodies for the past 40 years or so—long before the Entity invasion, anyway—but for most people it’s just something they take for granted, like their vaccination mark. They use them for the things they’re meant to be used for and don’t give them a thought beyond that. The biocomputer’s just a commonplace tool for them, like a fork, like a shovel. You have to have the hacker sort of mentality to be willing to turn your biocomputer into something more. That’s why, when the Entities came and took us over and made us build walls around our cities, most people reacted just like sheep, letting themselves be herded inside and politely staying there. The only ones who can move around freely now—because we know how to manipulate the mainframes through which the Entities rule us—are the hackers. And there aren’t many of us. I could tell right away that I had hooked myself on to one now.

  The moment we were in contact, he came at me like a storm.

  The strength of his
signal let me know I was up against something special and that I’d been hustled. He hadn’t been trying to buy a pardon at all. What he was looking for was a duel—Mr. Macho behind the bland smile, out to show the new boy in town a few of his tricks.

  No hacker had ever mastered me in a one-on-one anywhere. Not ever. I felt sorry for him but not much.

  He shot me a bunch of stuff, cryptic but easy, just by way of finding out my parameters. I caught it and stored it and laid an interrupt on him and took over the dialog. My turn to test him. I wanted him to begin to see who he was fooling around with. But just as I began to execute, he put an interrupt on me. That was a new experience. I stared at him with some respect.

  Usually, any hacker anywhere will recognize my signal in the first 30 seconds, and that’ll be enough to finish the interchange. He’ll know that there’s no point in continuing. But this guy either wasn’t able to identify me or just didn’t care, and he came right back with his interrupt. Amazing. So was the stuff he began laying on me next.

  He went right to work, really trying to scramble my architecture. Reams of stuff came flying at me up in the heavy-megabyte zone.

  JSPIKE. ABLTAG. NSLICE. DZCNT.

  I gave it right back to him, twice as hard.

  MAXFRG. MINPAU. SPKTOT. JSPIKE.

  He didn’t mind at all.

  MAXDZ. SPKTIM. FALTER. NSLICE.

  FRQSUM. EBURST.

  IBURST.

  PREBST.

  NOBRST.

  Mexican standoff. He was still smiling. Not even a trace of sweat on his forehead. Something eerie about him, something new and strange. This is some kind of borgmann hacker, I realized suddenly. He must be working for the Entities, roving the city, looking to make trouble for free-lancers like me. Good as he was, and he was plenty good, I despised him. A hacker who had become a borgmann—now, that was truly disgusting. I wanted to short him. I wanted to burn him out. I had never hated anyone so much in my life.

  I couldn’t do a thing with him.

  I was baffled. I was the Data King, the Megabyte Monster. All my life, I had floated back and forth across a world in chains, picking every lock I came across. And now this nobody was tying me in knots. Whatever I gave him, he parried; and what came back from him was getting increasingly bizarre. He was working with an algorithm I had never seen before and was having serious trouble solving. After a little while, I couldn’t even figure out what he was doing to me, let alone what I was going to do to cancel it. It was getting so I could barely execute. He was forcing me inexorably toward a wetware crash.