Year's Best SF 3

by David G. Hartwell

  “True, though.”

  Qent said sharply, “Just tell us what you—”

  “You never know when the Voice is on,” the man said mysteriously.

  Klair said, “And your printing is awful.”

  “Better than yours,” he said shrewdly.

  “That's not the point,” Qent said. “We demand to know—”

  “Come on. And shut up, huh?”

  They were in a wildness preserve before the man spoke. “I'm Marq. No Voice pickups here, at least according to the flow charts.”

  “You're an engineer?” Klair asked, admiring the oaks.

  “I'm a philosopher. I make my money engineering.”

  “How long have you been reading?”

  “Years. Started with some old manuals I found. Figured it out from scratch.”

  “So did we.” Qent said. “It's hard, not being able to ask for help from the Voice.”

  Marq nodded. “I did. Dumb, huh?”

  “What happened?”

  “Some Spectors came by. Just casual talk, y'know, but I knew what they were after.”

  “Evidence?” she asked uneasily.

  “When I asked the Voice there was a pause, just a little one. A priority shift, I know how to spot them. So I broke off and took the books I had to a hiding place. When I got back there were the Spectors, cool as you like, just kind of looking around my room.”

  “You didn't tell them…?” she asked.

  “You got to give them something. I had a copy of this thing about books that I couldn't understand, Centigrade 233. Kept it buried under a pseud-bush bed. They were getting funny on me so I took it out and gave it to them.”

  She blinked, startled. “What did they do? Arrest you?”

  Marq gave her a crooked grin. “Reading's not illegal, y'know. Just anti, that's all. So they let me off with six weeks of grouping.”

  “Wow, do I hate those,” Qent said.

  Marq shrugged. “I did the time. They poked at me and I had to pretend to see the light and all. They kept the book.”

  “You're brave,” Klair said.

  “Just stupid. I should never have asked the Voice.”

  Qent said earnestly, “You'd think the Voice would encourage us to learn. I mean, it'd be useful in emergencies. Say the Voice goes down, we could read the info we'd need.”

  Marq nodded. “I figure the Voice reads. It just doesn't want competition.”

  She said, “The Voice is a machine.”

  “So?” Marq shrugged again. “Who knows how smart it is?”

  “It's a service,” Qent said. “That's all.”

  “Notice how it won't store what we say?” Marq smiled shrewdly.

  Qent nodded. “It says it's trying to improve our memories.”

  “Reading was invented to replace memory,” Klair said. “I read it in a history book.”

  “So it must be true?” Marq shrugged derisively, a gesture that was beginning to irk Klair a lot.

  She hated politics and this was starting to sound like that. “How many books have you got?”

  “Lots. I found a tunnel into a vault. I can go there anytime.”

  Qent and Klair gasped at his audacity as he described how for years he had burrowed into sealed-off chambers, many rich in decaying documents and bound volumes. He spoke of exotica they had never seen, tomes which were nothing but names in the Dictionary: Encyclopedias, Thesauruses, Atlases, Alamancs. He had read whole volumes of the fabled Britannica!

  Would he trade? Lend? “Of course,” Marq said warmly.

  Their friendship began that way, a bit edgy and cautious at the margins, but dominated by the skill and secret lore they shared. Three years of clandestine reading followed before Marq disappeared.

  He wasn't at any of their usual meeting places. After all this time, they still did not know where he lived, or where his hoard of books might be. Marq was secretive. They searched the sprawling corridors of the complexes, but were afraid to ask the Voice for any info on him.

  The Majority Games were on then so the streets were more crowded than usual. Most people were out all the time, excited and eager and happy to be in the great mobs that thronged the squares. The Games took up everybody's time—except, of course, the three hours of work everyone had to put in, no exceptions, every laborday. Klair and Qent broke up to cover more ground and spent a full week on the search. Many times Klair blamed herself for not pressing Marq about where he lived, but the man was obsessively secretive. “Suppose they grab you, make you tell about me?” he had always countered.

  Now she wondered what the Spectors would do if they uncovered a lode of books like Marq's. Send him to Advanced Treatment? Or was there something even worse?

  She came home after a day of dogged searching and Qent was not there. He did not appear that evening. When she awoke the next morning she burst into tears. He was gone that day and the one after.

  On her way back from work, a routine counseling job, she resolved to go to the Spector. She halfheartedly watched the crowds, hoping to see Marq or Qent, and that was how she noticed that three men and a woman were moving parallel to her as she crossed the Plaza of Promise. They were all looking some other way but they formed four points of the compass around her with practiced precision.

  She walked faster and they did too. They looked stern and remorseless and she could not lose them in the warrens of streets and corridors near the two-room apartment she shared with Qent. They had waited five years to get one with a tiny balcony. Even then it was just two levels up from the muddy floor of the air shaft. But if you hooked your head over to the side you could see some sky that way.

  Klair kept moving in an aimless pattern and they followed. Of course she did not want to go to the apartment, where she would be trapped. But she was tired and she could not think of anything else to do.

  They knocked a few minutes after she collapsed on the bed. She had hoped they might hold off for a while. She was resigned. When she spun the door open the person she least expected to see was Marq.

  “You won't believe what's going on,” he said, brushing past her.

  “What? Where have you—”

  “The Meritocrats want us.”

  “For what?”

  “Reading!”

  “But the Voice—”

  “Keeps people out of touch and happy. Great idea—but it turns out you can't run everything with just the Voice.” He blinked, the merest hesitation. “Somebody's got to be able to access info at a higher level. That was our gut feeling, remember—that reading was different.”

  “Well, yes, but the Spectors—”

  “They keep people damped down, is all.” A slight pause. “Anybody who's got the savvy to see the signs, the grit to learn to piece together words on their own, to process it all—those are the people the Merits want. Us!”

  Klair blinked. This was too much to encompass. “But why did they take you away, and Qent—”

  “Had to be sure.” He gave his old familiar shrug. “Wanted to test our skills, make sure we weren't just posing. People might catch on, only pretend to read, y'know?”

  “I…see.” There was something about Marq that wasn't right. He had never had these pauses before…because he wasn't listening to the Voice then?

  She backed away from him. “That's marvelous news. When will Qent be back?”

  “Oh, soon, soon.” He advanced and she backed out onto the balcony.

  “So what job will you do? I mean, with reading in it?”

  They were outside. She backed into the railing. The usual distant clatter and chat of the air shaft gave her a momentary sense of security. Nothing could happen here, could it?

  “Oh, plenty. Looking up old stuff, comparing, y'know.” He waved his hands vaguely.

  It wasn't much of a drop from here. Over the railing, legs set right…

  “It's good work, really.”

  Could she could get away if she jumped? Marq wasn't the athletic type and she knew that if she
landed right on the mud below she wouldn't twist an ankle or anything. She had on sensible shoes. She could elude him. If she landed right.

  She gave him a quick, searching look. Had he come here alone? No, probably there were Spectors outside her door, just waiting for him to talk her into surrendering. Stall for time, yes.

  “How bad is it?”

  He grinned. “You won't mind. They just access that part of your mind for three hours a day. Then they install a shutdown on that cerebral sector.”

  “Shutdown? I—”

  “So you don't need to read any more. Just during work, is all. You get all you need that way. Then you're free!”

  She thought it through. Jump, get away. Couldn't use the Voice for help because they could undoubtedly track her if she had her receiver on. Could she get by just reading the old signs?

  Suppose she could. Then what? Find some friends she could trust. Stay underground? How? Living off what?

  “It's much better. Qent will be back soon and—”

  “Hold it. Don't move.”

  She looked down the air shaft. Was the jump worth it?

  You spool out of the illusion and snap—back into the tight cocoon. The automatic sensory leads retract, giving your skin momentary pinprick goodbye kisses. Once more you feel the cool clasping surfaces of the cocoon. Now you turn and ask, “Hey, where's the rest?”

  Myrph shrugs her shoulders, still busy undoing her leads. “That's all there was, I told you.”

  “Maybe it's just damaged?”

  “No, that's the end of the cube. There must be another cube to finish the story, but this was the only one I found back in that closet.”

  “But how does it end? What's she do?” You lean toward her, hoping maybe she's just teasing.

  “I dunno. What would you do? Jump?”

  You blink, not ready for the question. “Uh, this reading thing. What is it, really?”

  Myrph frowns. “It felt like a kind of your own silent voice inside your head.”

  “Is it real? I mean, does reading exist?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “So this isn't an historical at all, right? It's a fantasy.”

  “Must be. I've never seen those things on walls.”

  “Signs, she called them.” You think back. “They would have worn away a long time ago, anyway.”

  “I guess. Felt kinda strange, didn't it, being able to find out things without the Voice?”

  You bite your lip, thinking. Already the illusion of being that woman is slipping away, hard to fix in memory. She did have a kind of power all on her own with that reading thing. You liked that. “I wonder what she did?”

  “Hey, it's just a story.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I don't have to decide. It's just a story.”

  “But why tell it then?”

  Myrph says irritably, “It's just an old illusion, missing a cube.”

  “Maybe there was only one.”

  “Look, I want illusions to take me away, not stress me out.”

  You remember the power of it. “Can I have it, then?”

  “The cube? Sure.”

  Myrph tosses it over. It is curiously heavy, translucent and chipped with rounded corners. You cup it in your hand and like the weight of it.

  That is how it starts. You know already that you will go and look for the signs in the corridors and that for good or ill something new has come into your world and will now never leave it.

  Yeyuka

  GREG EGAN

  Greg Egan is one of the leading SF writers to emerge in recent decades from Australian SF onto the world stage, and the most prominent of them in the 1990s as the decade moves on toward the World SF convention in Australia in 1999. His novels include Quarantine, Permutation City, Distress, and Diaspora, and some of his best stories are collected in Axiomatic. This story appeared in the Australian literary magazine, Meanjin, and was one of several of his in 1997 that might have been chosen for this book. He is one of the strong and individual new voices in SF this decade with an invariably high level of execution in recent years. This story has an intimate quality, yet balanced (paradoxically?) by an ironic distance. More than many of his other stories it gets to the heart of cultural, social, and technological barriers that divide and segment our world today and raises the questions of those divisions, real and artificial. What do we have to give up to save others?

  On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then customize it, or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of UV exposure rendered all the colors visible.

  As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialize around me, I couldn't help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there'd been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma—and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.

  I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring's inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizeable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was released.

  So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn't. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumor far downstream, could never escape detection for long—and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control.

  The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for these catalysts—trapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and crannies molded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.

  With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to overcome any adversary.

  Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly session on a shared family unit, or even a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worries—fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painful—with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I'd come to think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I'd installed it, my life expectancy had risen by fifteen years—and no doubt my bank's risk-assessment software had assumed a similar extension to my working life, since I'd be paying off the loan I'd needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.

  I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep
into the flesh. This model wasn't designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared units, but it would only take a five minute surgical procedure under local anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single HealthGuard machine served forty million people—or rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in wearing my own personal version seemed almost as crass as arriving with a giant solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.

  Then again, nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis. I could have the ring immunize me against all of these and more, before removing it…but the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. I'd be no use to anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager or shanty-town dweller probably wouldn't even recognize the thing, let alone resent it. I was being hypersensitive.

  I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack. Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.

  Lisa saw me off at the airport.

  I said, “It's only three months. It'll fly past.” I was reassuring myself, not her.

  “It's not too late to change your mind.” She smiled calmly; no pressure, it was entirely my decision. In her eyes, I was clearly suffering from some kind of disease—a very late surge of adolescent idealism, or a very early mid-life crisis—but she'd adopted a scrupulously non-judgmental bedside manner. It drove me mad.

  “And miss my last chance ever to perform cancer surgery?” That was a slight exaggeration; a few cases would keep slipping through the HealthGuard net for years. Most of my usual work was trauma, though, which was going through changes of its own. Computerized safeguards had made traffic accidents rare, and I suspected that within a decade no one would get the chance to stick their hand in a conveyor belt again. If the steady stream of gunshot and knife wounds ever dried up, I'd have to re-train for nose jobs and reconstructing rugby players. “I should have gone into obstetrics, like you.”