The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Babies? Abby, your eggs are forty years old – ”

  “Exactly! Exactly, my eggs are only forty years old, and most of them are still good. Who do you want to have the babies, Suze? The Geezers? The world is starting again, Suze, and I – ”

  “The world was fine!” I pulled away from her. “The world was just fine!” Snot and tears were running down my nose into my mouth, salty and gooey. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my stockbroker’s suit, leaving a slick trail like a slug. “We were fine – ”

  “This isn’t about us – ”

  “Oh baloney!!” I lurched to my feet, grabbing the railing for balance. “As if you’re going to live with us in a galleon and firewater cannons and go to birthday parties! You’re just not, Abby, don’t kid yourself! You’re going to be that!” I pointed up the stairs. “Sexual jealousy and sexual exchange economy and cheating and mutual-exploitation-and-ownership and serial monogamy and divorce and the whole stupid crazy boring . . .”

  “Suze – ” she said in a small voice.

  “Just don’t!” I said. “Don’t drag it out! If you want to do it, do it, but then leave us alone! Okay? You’re not welcome.” I turned and headed down the stairs. “Get the hell out.”

  Max was standing at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I brushed past.

  The boys from the gym were in the car, eating yard-long submarine sandwiches with great gusto. Carla sat on the front steps, talking to a rag doll. She looked up, and her red jewel of an eye flashed – for a moment it was as bright as looking into the Sun at noon. Then she looked past me, into the sky.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked.

  I leaned against the doorframe and said nothing. A wind came down the street and crumpled sheets of paper danced along it.

  “I’m afraid of cows,” she volunteered. “And Millie” – she held up the rag doll – “is afraid of, um, um, you know the thing where if you take all the money people spend and the way they looked at each other that day and you put it inside what the weather’s going to do and then you can sing to cats and stuff? She’s afraid of that.”

  I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “Can you see the future, Carla?”

  She giggled, and then she looked serious. “You guys are all wrong about that. It’s just a game you made up. There isn’t any future.”

  “Do you like being Augmented?” I asked.

  “I like it but Millie doesn’t like it. Millie thinks it’s scary but she’s just silly. Millie wishes we were like people and trees and we didn’t have to make things okay all the time. But then we couldn’t play with bolshoiye-gemeinschaft-episteme-mekhashvei-ibura.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Max is coming out with Abby four thousand five hundred and sixty-two milliseconds after I finish talking right now and projected group cohesion rises by thirty-six percent if you don’t have a fight now so you should take the clowncar and I’ll give them a ride and I’d love to live with you but I know I’m too scary but it’s okay but can I visit on Max’s birthday?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You can visit on my birthday too.”

  “I can? I can?” She jumped up and hugged me, flinging her arms around my waist, pressing her cheek into my chest. “Wow, I didn’t even know you’d say that!” She pulled away, beaming at me, then pointed to the car. “Okay, quick, go! Bye!”

  I got in the car and clicked on the engine. Carla waved and she held Millie’s arm and waved it too. The door behind her opened, I saw Max’s shoe, and I drove off.

  A quarter mile away from Carla, the flatscreen blinked on again, and my earring started buzzing like crazy. I told it to let Travis through.

  “Abby’s fine,” I said. “She’s with Max. They’ll be coming home.”

  “Cool,” Travis said. “Whew! That’s a relief!”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Tommy and Shiri sent me video of the house. It looks awesome. Do you love it too?”

  “Yeah, I love it.” I was on I-90 now. Beyond the spires and aerial trams of Billings, I could see the funhouse suburbs spreading out before me – windmills, castles, ships, domes, faerie forests.

  “Cool, because I think they signed some papers or something.”

  “What? Travis, we all have to agree!” As I said it, it occurred to me that the only one who hadn’t seen the place was Abby. I gripped the wheel and burst out crying.

  “What? What?” Travis said.

  “Travis!” I wailed. “Abby wants to start the clock!”

  “I know,” Travis muttered.

  “What? You know?”

  “She told me this morning.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “She made me promise not to.”

  “Travis!”

  “I was hoping you’d talk her out of it.”

  I took the exit for Pirateland, swooshing through an orange plastic tunnel festooned with animated skeletons climbing out of Davy Jones’s lockers. “You can’t talk Abby out of anything.”

  “But we’ve got to, Suze, we’ve got to. C’mon, we can’t just fall apart like this. Katrina and Ogbu – ” he was doing his panic-stricken ratsqueak again, and suddenly I was very sick of it.

  “Just shut up and stop whining, Travis!” I shouted. “Either she’ll change her mind or she won’t, but she won’t, so you’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Travis didn’t say anything. I told my earring to drop the connection and block all calls.

  I pulled up outside the galleon and got out. I found a handkerchief in the glove compartment and cleaned my face thoroughly. My suit, like the quality piece of work it was, had already eaten and digested all the snot I’d smeared on it – the protein would probably do it good. I checked myself in the mirror – I didn’t want the Real Estate Lady to see me weepy. Then I got out and stood looking at the house. If I knew Tommy and Shiri, they were still inside, having discovered a roller-skating rink or rodeo room.

  Parked at the side of the house was the Real Estate Lady’s old-fashioned van – a real classic, probably gasoline-burning. I walked over to it. The side door was slid open. I looked in.

  Inside, reading a book, was a Nine. She was tricked out in total Kidgear – pony tails, barrettes t-shirt with a horse on it, socks with flashy dangly things. Together with the Lady’s Mommystyle getup, it made perfect, if twisted, sense. Personally I find that particular game of Let’s-Pretend sort of depressing and pitiful, but to each her own kink.

  “Hey,” I said. She looked up.

  “Um, hi,” she said.

  “You live around here?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “My mom, um, kinda doesn’t really want me to tell that to strangers.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Give the role-playing a rest, would you? I just asked a simple question.”

  She glared at me. “You shouldn’t make so many assumptions about people,” she said, and pointedly lifted her book up in front of her face.

  The clop-clop of the Lady’s shoes came down the drive. My scalp was prickling. Something was not altogether kosher in this sausage.

  “Oh, hello,” the Lady said brightly, if awkwardly. “I see you’ve met my daughter.”

  “Is that your actual daughter, or can the two of you just not get out of character?”

  The Lady crossed her arms and fixed me with her green-eyed stare. “Corintha contracted Communicative Developmental Arrestation Syndrome when she was two years old. She started the treatments seven years ago.”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open. “She’s a clock-started Two? She spent twenty-five years as an unaugmented two-year-old?”

  The Lady leaned past me into the van. “You okay in here, honey?”

  “Great,” said Corintha from behind her book. “Other than the occasional ignoramus making assumptions.”

  “Corintha, please don’t be rude,” the Lady said.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  The Lady turned to me. I think my eyes must have been bug
ging out of my head. She laughed. “I’ve seen your documentaries, you know.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes.” She leaned up against the van. “They’re technically very well done, and I think some of what you have to say is very compelling. That one with all the blanked-out footage – that gave me a real feeling for what it’s like for those children who are wired up into the Internet.”

  An odd and wrongheaded way of putting it, but I limited myself to saying, “Uh – thanks.”

  “But I think you’re very unfair to those of us who didn’t Augment our children. To watch your work, you’d think every parent who didn’t Augment succumbed to Parenting Fatigue and sent their toddlers off to the government daycare farms, visiting only at Christmas. Or that they lived some kind of barbaric, abusive, incestuous existence.” She looked over at her daughter. “Corintha has been a joy to me every day of her life – ”

  “Oh, Mom!” Corintha said from behind her book.

  “ – but I never wanted to stand in the way of her growing up. I just didn’t think Augmentation was the answer. Not for her.”

  “And you thought you had the right to decide,” I said.

  “Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “I thought I had the obligation to decide.”

  The Suze everyone who knows me knows would have made some sharp rejoinder. None came. I watched Corintha peek out from behind her book.

  There was silence for a while. Corintha went back to reading.

  “My friends still inside?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Lady said. “They want the place. I think it fits six very comfortably, and – ”

  “Five,” I said huskily. “I think it’s going to be five.”

  “Oh,” the Lady looked nonplussed. “I’m – sorry to hear that.”

  Corintha put her book down. “How come?”

  The Lady and I looked at her.

  “Oh, is that a rude question?” Corintha said.

  “It’s a bit prying, dear,” the Lady said.

  “Ah – ” I said. I looked at Corintha. “One of us wants to – start the clock. Start the conventional biological aging process.”

  “So?” Corintha said.

  “Honey,” said the Lady. “Sometimes if people–change–they don’t want to live together anymore.”

  “That’s really dumb,” said Corintha. “If you didn’t even have a fight or anything. If it’s just that somebody wants to grow up. I would never get rid of my friends over that.”

  “Corintha!”

  “Would you let her talk? I’m trying to respect your archaic ideas of parent-child relationships here, Lady, but you’re not making it easy.”

  The lady cleared her throat. “Sorry,” she said after a moment.

  I looked out at the mainmast and the cannons of our galleon. The rolling lawn. This place had everything. The trampolines and the pools, the swingropes and the games. I could just imagine the birthday parties we’d have here, singing and cake and presents and dares, everyone getting wet, foamguns and crazy mixed-up artificial animals. We could hire clowns and acrobats, storytellers and magicians. At night we’d sleep in hammocks on deck or on blankets on the lawn, under the stars, or all together in a pile, in the big pillowspace in the bow.

  And I couldn’t see Abby here. Not a growing-upward Abby, getting taller, sprouting breasts, wanting sex with some huge apes of men or women or both. Wanting privacy, wanting to bring her clock-started friends over to whisper and laugh about menstruation and courtship rituals. Abby with a mate. Abby with children.

  “There’s a place over by Rimrock Road,” the Lady said slowly. “It’s an old historic mansion. It’s not quite as deluxe or as – thematic as this. But the main building has been fitted out for recreation-centered group living. And there are two outbuildings that allow some privacy and – different styles of life.”

  I stood up. I brushed off my pants. I put my hands in my pockets.

  “I want us to go see that one,” I said.

  – for Jeff and Terri

  THE THIRD PARTY

  David Moles

  New writer David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Polyphony 2, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Here he unravels a suspenseful tangle of intrigue, espionage, and cultural conflict on a troubled distant planet – a tangle where it helps to know who all the players are.

  IT WAS CLOSER TO dawn than midnight when Cicero pushed aside the bar’s canvas half-curtain. He brought a gust of wind and rain in with him, the wind blood-warm, the rain with the green taste of a stagnant pond.

  There were three stools in front of the plywood counter, and the middle one was occupied. Cicero chose the one on the left and sat down heavily.

  “Where have you been?” demanded the man on the middle stool. The language he used had no more than fifty speakers in the world.

  Cicero ignored him. The bartender set a wooden cup in front of him and poured in three fingers of cloudy spirit. While it settled, the old man dished out a bowl of soup and set it down next to the cup. Cicero dipped a hand into his algae-stained rain cape and pushed a handful of zinc coins across the bar.

  The other man sighed.

  Cicero reached past him for the bottle of hot sauce and poured a generous dollop into the soup bowl. “Faculty reception,” he said. “Couldn’t get away.” He stirred the soup with his long spoon. “You had to pick the first night of storm season, didn’t you? It’s pissing down out there.” He took a noisy slurp from the short spoon and followed it with a gulp from the cup.

  “Damn it, Cicero – ”

  “I’m joking,” Cicero said. He balanced a fishball on the long spoon and eyed it critically before popping it in his mouth. “I was followed,” he said around the mouthful. “Took me a bit to lose them.”

  The other man tensed. “Dealers?”

  “What?” Cicero swallowed and put down his spoon. “Of course it wasn’t the dealers! Do you think they’d use people? They’d use, I don’t know, drones or something.”

  “Right,” the other man said, relaxing.

  “Marius,” Cicero said, “what’s gotten into you? It was the Specials or it was the Secret Empire, and either way I left them behind before I was out of the District. Strictly local.”

  Marius sighed and rapped on the bar to signal the bartender. Now it was Cicero’s turn to wait impatiently while the bartender set down another bowl and refilled both cups.

  Finally Cicero shrugged, and turned his attention back to his soup. “There was a reception,” he volunteered, around another mouthful of fish. “At the Chancellor’s. For the new Semard Professor of Inapplicable Optics. Had a nice chat with him about luminiferous ether.”

  “That’s brilliant, Cicero. You’re supposed to be teaching political economy, not physics.”

  “I’ll teach what I damn well please,” Cicero said mildly.

  He was quiet for a moment, sipping his drink. After a little while he looked up. “Talking of dealers,” he said. “They were at the University today. Two of them. Nosing around the library.”

  “What were they looking for?” Marius said.

  “I don’t know,” said Cicero, “but I didn’t like it. They weren’t even in local clothes. I don’t know who the librarians thought they were.”

  “Listen, Cicero,” Marius said. “Galen’s thinking about going home.”

  “And leaving Salomé to the dealers?” Cicero said. “Pull the other one.”

  “I’m serious,” Marius said. “The consensus in Outreach is that it would be the safest thing.”

  Cicero put his drink down.

  “Fuck the consensus,” he said.

  He waited for Marius to say something, and when the other man remained silent, said:

  “What are you going to do?”

  Marius sighed. “I don’t know. Wait till they make a decision, I suppose.”

  Cicero looked down, toying with his cup. They were both silent for a little while.

  “Marius,” Cicero said ev
entually. “If we do go back – is there anyone you’re going to regret leaving behind?”

  “Plenty of people,” said Marius. “The whole workers’ movement, for a start.” He looked at Cicero, and saw the expression on his face.

  “Oh,” he said. He shook his head. “No. Not like that.”

  Cicero sighed.

  “You’re in a tight spot, aren’t you?” said Marius.

  “I suppose I am,” Cicero said.

  He caught the first eastbound train back to the University District. It was nearly empty; the only passengers in Cicero’s car were a couple of comatose, second-shift City clerks, slinking back to their families in the suburbs after drinking away the week’s wage packet.

  He felt very alone, all of a sudden. He was not supposed to be alone. Somewhere overhead were the two Community Outreach ships, Equity and Solidarity; there were analysts and computers, there was the QT network linking them to the Outreach offices at Urizen and Zoa, and through them to the rest of Outreach and to the Community at large. Some small but perceptible fraction of the Community undoubtedly was, right now, focusing its attention on this world, this continent, this city; perhaps even on Cicero himself.

  The train passed the dockside shantytowns and the skeletal, rust-streaked shapes of waterfront cranes, and came out onto the long high span of Old Republic Bridge. For a moment the clouds parted; on the left was the great sparkling gray-green bay, with the darker green of the inland sea beyond, and on the right was Basia, bright and dirty and beautiful, wrapped in tropical foliage from the wooden houses of the poor to the gilded, steel-framed spires of the City.

  A million people in Basia. A hundred million more scattered over the surface of Salomé. Working. Sleeping. Praying. Stealing. Killing one another, with knives, and bullets, and poor sanitation, and bad fiscal policy. Making love.

  “Fuck it,” Cicero said aloud, making one of the sleeping clerks snort and look up.

  He wondered how many of the researchers and experts and self-styled authorities really understood what they were doing. Very few, he suspected. It was all very well for them to talk about the weight of history, about emergent complexity and long-term consequences, about gradual change in due course – when they never had to face the people whose lives were being turned upside-down by their decisions, face them and look them in the eye.