Robots: The Recent A.I.

by Elizabeth Bear

  “You’re right,” Kepler said. I flinched. I could hear the hatred in her voice. She nodded at Oslo.

  He raised his walking stick. The tiny grains inside rattled around, and then a jagged finger of energy leapt out and struck Cruzie in the small of her back.

  Cruzie jerked around, arms flopping as she danced, then dropped to the ground. Oslo pressed the stick to her head and fired it again. Blood gushed from Cruzie’s eye sockets as something inside her skull went ‘pop.’

  A wisp of smoke curled from her open mouth.

  Oslo and Kepler put thumbs to the screens. “We have a unanimous vote now.”

  But a red warning sign flashed back at them. Beck relaxed slightly, a tiny curl of a smile briefly appearing.

  Oslo raised his walking stick and pointed it at Beck. “Our communications are blocked.”

  “Yes,” Beck said. “The Compact is voting against preemptive genocide.”

  For a split second, I saw the decision to kill Beck flit across Kepler’s face. “If you kill him,” I spoke up, “the Compact will spend resources hunting you two down. You can’t enjoy your riches if you’re dead.”

  Kepler nodded. “You’re right.” But she looked at me, a question on her face.

  I shrugged. “If you’re all dead, I don’t have points on the package.”

  “Trigger them manually,” Oslo said. “We’ll bring the drone. We won’t leave him up here to cause more trouble. Bring him, or her, or whatever the Friend calls itself as well. Your contract, Alex, is now to watch Beck.”

  We burned our way through the green atmosphere of Ve, the lander bucking and groaning, skin cracking as it weathered the heat of our reentry fireball.

  From the tiny cramped cockpit I watched us part the clouds and spiral slowly down out of the sky as the wings unfurled from slots in the tear-drop sized vehicle’s side. They started beating a complicated figure-eight motion.

  Oslo aimed his walking stick at us when the lander touched down. “Put on your helmet, get out. Both of you.”

  We did so.

  Heavy chlorine-rich mists swirled around, disturbed by our landing. Large puffball flowers spurted acid whenever touched by a piece of stray stirred-up debris, and the black, plastic leaves all around us bobbed gently in a low breeze.

  Oslo and Kepler pulled a large pack out of the lander’s cargo area. Long pieces of tubing. They set to building a freestanding antenna, piece by piece. I watched Beck. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his posture.

  He was about to run. Which made no sense. Run where? On this world?

  Within a few minutes Oslo and Kepler had snapped together a thirty-foot tall tower. I swallowed, and remained silent. It was a choice, a deliberate path. I broke my contract.

  Oslo snapped a clip to the top of the tower, then unrolled a length of cable. He and Kepler used it to pull the super light structure up.

  That was the moment Beck ran, as it hung halfway up to standing.

  “Shit,” Oslo cursed over the tiny speakers in our helmets, but he didn’t drop the structure. “You’ve only got a couple hours of air you moron!”

  The only response was Beck’s heavy breathing.

  When the antenna stood upright, Oslo approached me, the walking stick out. “You didn’t warn us.”

  “He was wearing a spacesuit,” I said calmly.

  But I could see Oslo didn’t believe me. His eyes creased and his fingers tightened. A bright explosion of pain ripped into me.

  My vision cleared.

  I was on my hands and feet, shaking with pain from the electrical discharge. A whirlwind of debris whipped around me. I looked up to see the lander lifting into the sky.

  So that was it. I’d made my choice: to try and not be a monster.

  And it had been in vain. The Vesians would be lobotomized by Kepler’s virus. Beck would die. I would die.

  I watched the lander beginning a wide spiral upward away from me. In a few seconds it would fire its rockets and climb for orbit.

  In a couple hours, I would run out of air.

  Four large gourds arced high over the black forest and slapped into the side of the lander. I frowned. At first, it looked like they had no effect. The lander kept spiraling up.

  But then, it faltered.

  The lander shook, and smoke spilled out of a crack in the side somewhere.

  It exploded, the fireball hanging in the sky.

  “Get away from the antenna,” Beck suddenly said. “It’s next.”

  I ran without a second thought, and even as I got free of the clearing, gourds of acid hit the structure. The metal sizzled, foamed, and then began to melt.

  A few seconds later, I broke out onto a dirt path where the catapults firing the gourds of acid had been towed into place.

  Beck waited for me, surrounded by a crowd of Vesians. He wore only his helmet, he’d ripped his suit off. His skin bubbled from bad chemical burn blisters.

  “The Vesians destroyed all the remote-operating vehicles with the virus in it,” he said. “The queens have quarantined any Vesians near any area that had an ROV. The species will survive.”

  “You’ve been talking to them,” I said. And then I thought back to the comforting smell in my room the first night Beck spent with me. “You’re communicating with them. You warned them.”

  Beck held up his suit. “Yes. The Compact altered me to be an ambassador to them.”

  “Beck, how long can you survive in this environment?” I stared at his blistered skin.

  “A year. Maybe. There will be another ready by then. Maybe a structure to live in. The Gheda will be here soon to bring air. The Compact has reached an agreement with them. The Vesian queens are agreeing to join the Compact. The Compact gets to extend out of the mother system, but only to Ve. In exchange, the Gheda get rights to all patentable discoveries made in the new ecosystem. They’re particularly interested in plastic-based organic photosynthesis.”

  I collapsed to the ground, realizing that I would live. Beck sat next to me. A small Vesian, approached, a gourd in its mandibles. It set the organic, plastic bottle at my legs. “What’s that?”

  “A jar of goodwill,” Beck said. “The Vesian queen of this area is thanking you.”

  I was still just staring at it two hours later as my air faded out, my vision blurred, and the Gheda lander finally reached us.

  The harbormaster cocked his head. “You’re back.”

  “I’m back,” I said. Someone was unpacking my two bags. one of them carefully holding the Vesian ‘gift.’

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the harbormaster said. “Not with a contract like that.”

  “It didn’t work out.” I looked out into the vacuum of space beyond us. “Certainly not for the people who hired me. Or me.”

  “You have a peripheral contract with the Compact. An all-you-can-breath line of credit on the station. You’re not a citizen, but on perpetual retainer as the Compact’s primary professional Friend for all dealings in this system. You did well enough.”

  I grinned. “Points on a package like what they offered me was a fairy tale. A fairy tale you’d have to be soulless to want to have come true.”

  “I’m surprised that you did not choose to join the Compact,” the harbormaster said, looking closely at me. “It is a safe place for humans in this universe. Even as a peripheral for them, you could still be in danger during patent negotiations with Gheda.”

  “I know. But this is home. My home. I’m not a drone, I don’t want to be one.”

  The harbormaster sighed. “You understand the station is my only love. I don’t have a social circle. There is only the ebb and flow of this structure’s health for me.”

  I smiled. “That’s why I like you, harbormaster. You have few emotions. You are a fair dealer. You’re the closest thing I have to family. You may even be the closest thing I have to a friend, friend with a lowercase ‘f.’ ”

  “You follow your contracts to the letter. I like that about you
,” the harbormaster said. “I’m glad you will continue on here.”

  Together we watched the needle-like ship that had brought me back home silently fall away from the station.

  “The Compact purchased me a ten-by-ten room with a porthole,” I said. “I don’t have to come up here to sneak a look at the stars anymore.”

  The harbormaster sighed happily. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? I think, we’ve always loved them, haven’t we? Even before we were forced to leave the mother world.”

  “That’s what the history books say,” I said quietly over the sound of ducts and creaking station. “We dreamed of getting out here, to live among them. Dreamed of the wonders we’d see.”

  “The Gheda don’t see the stars,” the harbormaster said. “They have few portholes. Before I let the Gheda turn me into a harbormaster, I demanded the contract include this room.”

  “They don’t see them the way we do,” I agreed.

  “They’re not human,” the harbormaster said.

  “No, they’re not.” I looked out at the distant stars. “But then, few things are anymore.”

  The Gheda ship disappeared in a blinding flash of light, whipping through space toward its next destination.

  THE SHIPMAKER

  ALIETTE DE BODARD

  Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this even before she’d reached the engineering habitat, even before shed seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

  Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le Dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole—to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

  The Easterners or the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke of recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a patchwork often thousand others. To Dac Kien—and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer—fell the honour of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

  The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the designs overlay on her vision to disappear.

  “Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quiet. The Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”

  Dac Kien had expected many things: a classmate from the examinations on a courtesy visit; an Imperial Censor from Dongjing, calling her to some other posting, even further away from the capital; or perhaps even someone from her family, mother or sister or uncles wife, here to remind her of the unsuitability of her life choices.

  She hadn’t expected a stranger: a woman with brown skin, almost dark enough to be Viet herself, her lips thin and white, her eyes as round as the moon.

  A Mexica. A foreigner . . . Dac Kien stopped the thought before it could go far. For the woman wore no cotton, no feathers, but the silk robes of a Xuyan housewife, and the five wedding gifts (all pure gold, from necklace to bracelets) shone like stars on the darkness of her skin.

  Dac Kien’s gaze travelled down to the curve of the woman’s belly, a protruding bulge so voluminous that it threw her whole silhouette out of balance. “I greet you, younger sister. I am Dac Kien, Grand Master of Design Harmony for this habitat.” She used the formal tone, suitable for addressing a stranger.

  “Elder sister.” The Mexica’s eyes were bloodshot, set deep within the heavy face. “I am . . . ” She grimaced, one hand going to her belly as if to tear it out. “Zoquitl,” she whispered at last, the accents of her voice slipping back to the harsh patterns of her native tongue. “My name is Zoquitl.” Her eyes started to roll upwards, and she went on, taking on the cadences of something learnt by rote. “I am the womb and the resting place, the quickener and the Mind-bearer.”

  Dac Kien’s stomach roiled, as if an icy fist were squeezing it. “You’re early. The ship—”

  “The ship has to be ready.”

  The interjection surprised her. All her attention had been focused on the Mexica—Zoquitl—and what her coming here meant. Now she forced herself to look at the other passenger off the shuttle, a Xuyan man in his mid-thirties. His accent was that of Anjiu province, on the Fifth Planet. His robes, with the partridge badge and the button of gold, were those of a minor official of the seventh rank, but they were marked with the yin-yang symbol, showing stark black and white against the silk.

  “You’re the birth-master,” she said.

  He bowed. “I have that honour.” His face was harsh, all angles and planes on which the light caught, highlighting the thin lips, the high cheekbones. “Forgive me my abruptness, but there is no time to lose.”

  “I don’t understand.” Dac Kien looked again at the woman, whose eyes bore a glazed look of pain. “She’s early,” she said, flatly, and she wasn’t speaking of their arrival time.

  The birth-master nodded.

  “How long?”

  “A week, at most.” The birth-master grimaced. “The ship has to be ready.”

  Dac Kien tasted bile in her mouth. The ship was all but made—and, like a jade statue, it would brook no corrections nor oversights. Dac Kien and her team had designed it specifically for the Mind within Zoquitl’s womb, starting out from the specifications the imperial alchemists had given them, the delicate balance of humours, optics and flesh that made up the being Zoquitl carried. The ship would answer to nothing else; only Zoquitl’s Mind would be able to seize the heartroom, to quicken the ship, and take it into deep planes, where fast star-travel was possible.

  “I can’t—” Dac Kien started, but the birth-master shook his head, and she didn’t need to hear his answer to know what he would say.

  She had to. This had been the posting she’d argued for, after she came in second at the state examinations. This, not a magistrate’s tribunal and district, not a high-placed situation in the palace’s administration, not the prestigious Courtyard of Writing Brushes, as would have been her right. This was what the imperial court would judge her on.

  She wouldn’t get another chance.

  “A week.” Hanh shook her head. “What do they think you are, a Mexica factory overseer?”

  “Hanh.” It had been a long day, and Dac Kien had come back to their quarters looking for comfort. In hindsight, she should have known how Hanh would take the news: her partner was an artist, a poet, always seeking the right word and the right allusion—ideally suited to understanding the delicacy that went into the design of a ship, less than ideal to acknowledge any need for urgency.

  “I have to do this,” Dac Kien said.

  Hanh grimaced. “Because they’re pressuring you into it? You know what it will look like.” She gestured towards the low mahogany table in the centre of the room. The ship’s design hung inside a translucent cube, gently rotating, the glimpses of its interior interspersed with views of other ships, the ones from which it had taken its inspiration: all the great from The Red Carp to The Golden Mountain and The Snow-White Blossom. Their hulls gleamed in the darkness, slowly and subtly bending out of shape to become the final structure of the ship hanging outside the habitat. “It’s a whole, lil’ sis. You can’t butcher it and hope to keep your reputation intact.”

  “She could die of it,” Dac Kien said, at last. “Of the birth, and it would be worse if she did it for nothing.”


  “The girl? She’s gui. Foreign.”

  Meaning she shouldn’t matter. “So were we, once upon a time,” Dac Kien said. “You have a short memory.”

  Hanh opened her mouth, closed it. She could have pointed out that they weren’t quite gui, that China, Xuya’s motherland, had once held Dai Viet for centuries, but Hanh was proud of being Viet, and certainly not about to mention such shameful details. “It’s the girl that’s bothering you, then?”

  “She does what she wants,” Dac Kien said.

  “For the prize.” Hanh’s voice was faintly contemptuous. Most of the girls who bore Minds were young and desperate, willing to face the dangers of the pregnancy in exchange for a marriage to a respected official. For a status of their own, a family that would welcome them in, and a chance to bear children of good birth.

  Both Hanh and Dac Kien had made the opposite choice, long ago. For them, as for every Xuyan who engaged in same-gender relationships, there would be no children, no one to light incense at the ancestral altars, no voices to chant and honour their names after they were gone. Through life, they would be second-class citizens, consistently failing to accomplish their duties to their ancestors. In death, they would be spurned, forgotten, gone as if they had never been.

  “I don’t know,” Dac Kien said. “She’s Mexica. They see things differently where she comes from.”

  “From what you’re telling me, she’s doing this for Xuyan reasons.”

  For fame, and for children, all that Hanh despised—what she called their shackles, their overwhelming need to produce children, generation after generation.

  Dac Kien bit her lip, wishing she could have Hanh’s unwavering certainties. “It’s not as if I have much choice in the matter.”

  Hanh was silent for a while. At length, she moved, came to rest behind Dac Kien, her hair falling down over Dac Kien’s shoulders, her hands trailing at Dac Kien’s nape. “You’re the one who keeps telling me we always have a choice, HI’ sis.”

  Dac Kien shook her head. She said that when weary of her family’s repeated reminders that she should marry and have children, when they lay in the darkness side by side after making love and she saw the future stretching in front of her, childless and ringed by old prejudices.