The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’ve heard this gibberish before. What’s the point?”

  Innis said, “There’s no way of removing the implants without loss of order in your neural maps. We can’t remove them.”

  “Oh shit, man…”

  Charley Hughes said, “Though the snake cannot be removed, it can perhaps be charmed. Your difficulties arise from its uncivilized, uncontrolled nature—its appetites are, you might say, primeval. An ancient part of your brain has gotten the upper hand over the neocortex, which properly should be in command. Through working with Aleph, these … propensities can be integrated into your personality and thus controlled.”

  “What choice you got?’ Innis asked. “We’re the only game in town. Come on, George. We’re ready for you just down the corridor.”

  The only light in the room came from a globe in one corner. George lay across a kind of hammock, a rectangular lattice of twisted brown fibers strung across a transparent plastic frame and suspended from the ceiling of the small, dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored cables ran from his neck and disappeared into chrome plates sunk into the floor.

  Innis said, “First we’ll run a test program. Charley will give you perceptions—colors, sounds, tastes, smells—and you tell him what you’re picking up. We need to make sure we’ve got a clean interface. Call the items off, George, and he’ll stop you if he has to.”

  Innis went through a door and into a narrow rectangular room, where Charley Hughes sat at a dark plastic console studded with lights. Behind him were chrome stacks of monitor-and-control equipment, the yellow SenTrax sunburst on the face of each piece of shining metal.

  The pink walls went to red, the light strobed, and George writhed in the hammock. Charley Hughes’s voice came through George’s inner ear: “We are beginning.”

  “Red,” George said. “Blue. Red and blue. A word—ostrich.”

  “Good. Go on.”

  “A smell, ahh … sawdust, maybe.”

  “You got it.”

  “Shit. Vanilla. Almonds.”

  This went on for quite a while. “You’re ready,” Charley Hughes said.

  When Aleph came on-line, the red room disappeared.

  A matrix 800 by 800—six hundred and forty thousand pixels forming an optical image—the CAS A supernova remnant, a cloud of dust seen through a composite of x-ray and radio wave from HEHOO, NASA’s High Energy High Orbit Observatory. But George didn’t see the image at all—he listened to an ordered, meaningful array of information.

  Byte transmission: 750 million groups squirting from a National Security Agency satellite to a receiving station near Chincoteague Island, off the eastern shore of Virginia. He could read them.

  “It’s all information,” the voice said—its tone not colorless but sexless, and somehow distant. “What we know, what we are. You’re at a new level now. What you call the snake cannot be reached through language—it exists in a prelinguistic mode—but through me it can be manipulated. First, however, you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to see the world as I do.”

  * * *

  Lizzie took George to be fitted for a suit, and he spent that day learning how to get in and out of the stiff white carapace without assistance. Then over the next three weeks she led him through its primary operations and the dense list of safety procedures.

  “Red Burn,” she said. They floated in the suit locker, empty suit cradles beneath them, the white shells hanging from one wall like an audience of disabled robots. “You see that one spelled out on your faceplate, and you have screwed up. You’ve put yourself into some kind of no-return trajectory. So you just cool everything and call for help, which should arrive in the form of Aleph taking control of your suit functions, and then you relax and don’t do a damned thing.”

  He flew first in a lighted dome in the station, his faceplate open and Lizzie yelling at him, laughing as he tumbled out of control and bounced off the padded walls. After a few days of that, they went outside the station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with “Red Burn,” “Suit Integrity Failure,” and so forth.

  * * *

  While George focused most of his energies and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to Hughes and plugged into Aleph. The hammock would swing gently after he settled into it; Charley would snap the cables home and leave.

  Aleph unfolded himself slowly. It fed him machine and assembly language, led him through vast trees of C-SMART, its “intelligent assistant” decision-making programs, opened up the whole electromagnetic spectrum as it came in from Aleph’s various inputs. George understood it all—the voices, the codes.

  When he unplugged, the knowledge faded but there was something else behind it, so far just a skewing of perception, a sense that his world had changed.

  Instead of color, he sometimes saw a portion of the spectrum; instead of smell, he felt the presence of certain molecules; instead of words, he heard structured collections of phonemes. His consciousness had been infected by Aleph’s.

  But that wasn’t what worried George. He seemed to be cooking inside, and he had a more or less constant awareness of the snake’s presence, dormant but naggingly there. One night he smoked most of a pack of Charley’s Gauloises and woke up the next morning with barbed wire in his throat and fire in his lungs. That day he snapped at Lizzie as she put him through his paces and once lost control entirely—she had to disable his suit controls and bring him down. “Red Burn,” she said. “Man, what the hell were you doing?”

  * * *

  At the end of three weeks, he soloed—no tethered excursion but a self-guided Extra Station Activity, hang your ass out over the endless night. He edged carefully from the protection of the airlock and looked around him.

  The Orbital Energy Grid, the construction job that had brought Athena into existence, hung before him, photovoltaic collectors arranged in an ebony lattice, silver microwave transmitters standing in the sun. But the station itself held the eye, its hodgepodge of living, working, and experimental structures clustered without apparent regard to symmetry or form—some rotating to provide spin-gravity, some motionless in the unfiltered sunlight. Amber-beaconed figures crawled slowly across its face or moved toward red-lighted tugs, which looked like piles of random junk as they moved in long arcs, their maneuvering rockets lighting up in brief, diamond-hard points.

  Lizzie stayed just outside the airlock, tracking him by his suit’s radio beacon but letting him run free. She said, “Move away from the station, George. It’s blocking your view of Earth.” He did.

  White cloud stretched across the blue globe, patches of brown and green visible through it. At 1400 hours his time, he was looking down almost directly above the mouth of the Amazon, where it was noon, so the Earth stood in full sunlight. Just a small thing, filling only nineteen degrees of his vision.…

  “Oh yes,” George said. Hiss and hum of the suit’s air conditioning, crackle over the earphones of some stray radiation passing through, quick pant of his breath inside the helmet—sounds of this moment, superimposed on the floating loveliness. His breath came more slowly, and he switched off the radio to quiet its static, turned down the suit’s air conditioning, then hung in ear-roaring silence. He was a speck against the night.

  Sometime later a white suit with a trainer’s red cross on its chest moved across his vision. “Oh shit,” George said and switched his radio on. “I’m here, Lizzie,” he said.

  “George, you don’t screw around like that. What the hell were you doing?”

  “Just watching the view.”

  * * *

  That night he dreamed of pink dogwood blossoms, luminous against a purple sky, and the white noise of rainfall. Something scratched at the door—he awoke to the filtered but mechanical smell of the space station, felt a deep regret that the rain could never fall there, and started to turn over and go back to sleep, hoping to dream again of the idyllic, rainswept landscape. Then h
e thought, something’s there, got up, saw by red numbers on the wall that it was after two in the morning, and went naked to the door.

  White globes cast misshapen spheres of light in a line around the curve of the corridor. Lizzie lay motionless, half in shadow. George knelt over her and called her name; her left foot made a thump as it kicked once against the metal flooring.

  “What’s wrong?” he said. Her dark-painted nails scraped the floor, and she said something, he couldn’t tell what. “Lizzie,” he said. “What do you want?”

  His eyes caught on the red teardrop against the white curve of breast, and he felt something come alive in him. He grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and ripped it to the crotch. She clawed at his cheek, made a sound millions of years old, then raised her head and looked at him, mutual recognition passing between them like a static shock: snake-eyes.

  * * *

  The phone buzzed. When George answered it, Charley Hughes said, “Come see us in the conference room, we need to talk.” Charley smiled and cut the connection.

  The wall read 0718 GMT. Morning.

  In the mirror was a gray face with red fingernail marks, brown traces of dried blood—face of an accident victim or Jack the Ripper the morning after … he didn’t know which, but he knew something inside him was happy. He felt completely the snake’s toy, totally out of control.

  * * *

  Hughes sat at one end of the dark-veneered table, Innis at the other, Lizzie halfway between them. The left side of her face was red and swollen, with a small purplish mouse under the eye. George unthinkingly touched the livid scratches on his check, then sat on the couch, placing himself out of the circle.

  “Aleph told us what happened,” Innis said.

  “How the hell does it know?” George said, but as he did so he remembered concave circles of glass inset in the ceilings of the corridors and his room. Shame, guilt, humiliation, fear, anger—George got up from the couch, went to Innis’s end of the table, and leaned over him. “Did it?” he said. “What did it say about the snake, Innis? Did it tell you what the hell went wrong?”

  “It’s not the snake,” Innis said.

  “Call it the cat,” Lizzie said, “if you’ve got to call it something. Mammalian behavior George, cats in heat.”

  A familiar voice—cool, distant—came from speakers in the room’s ceiling. “She is trying to tell you something, George. There is no snake. You want to believe in something reptilian that sits inside you, cold and distant, taking strange pleasures. However, as Dr. Hughes explained to you before, the implant is an organic part of you. You can no longer evade the responsibility for these things. They are you.”

  Charley Hughes, Innis, and Lizzie were looking at him calmly, perhaps expectantly. All that had happened built up inside him, washing through him, carrying him away. He turned and walked out of the room.

  “Maybe someone should talk to him,” Innis said. Charley Hughes sat glum and speechless, cigarette smoke in a cloud around him. “I’ll go,” Lizzie said. She got up and left.

  “Ready or not, he’s gonna blow,” Innis said.

  Charley Hughes said, “You’re probably right.” A fleeting picture, causing Charley to shake his head, of Paul Coen as his body went to rubber and exploded out the airlock hatch, pictured with terrible clarity in Aleph’s omniscient monitoring cameras. “Let us hope we have learned from our mistakes.”

  There was no answer from Aleph—as if it had never been there.

  * * *

  The Fear had two parts. Number one, you have lost control absolutely. Number two, having done so, the real you emerges, and you won’t like it. George wanted to run, but there was no place at Athena Station to hide. Here he was face to face with consequences. On the operating table at Walter Reed—it seemed a thousand years ago, as the surgical team gathered around, his doubts disappeared in the cold chemical smell rising up inside him on a wave of darkness—he had chosen to submit, lured by the fine strangeness of it all (to be part of the machine, to feel its tremors inside you and guide them), hypnotized by the prospect of that unsayable rush, that high. Yes, the first time in the A-230 he had felt it—his nerves extended, strung into the fiber body, wired into a force so far beyond his own … wanting to corkscrew across the sky, guided by the force of his will. He had bought technology’s sweet dream.…

  There was a sharp rap at the door. Through its speaker, Lizzie said, “Let me in. We’ve got to talk.”

  He opened the door and said, “What about?”

  She stepped through, looked around at the small beige-walled room, bare metal desk, and rumpled cot, and George could see the immediacy of last night in her eyes—the two of them in that bed, on this floor. “About this,” she said. She took his hands and pushed his index fingers into the cable junctions in her neck. “Feel it, our difference.” Fine grid of steel under his fingers. “What no one else knows. What we are, what we can do. We see a different world—Aleph’s world—we reach deeper inside ourselves, experience impulses that are hidden from others, that they deny.”

  “No, goddammit, it wasn’t me. It was—call it what you want, the snake, the cat.”

  “You’re being purposely stupid, George.”

  “I just don’t understand.”

  “You understand, all right. You want to go back, but there’s no place to go, no Eden. This is it, all there is.”

  * * *

  But he could fall to Earth, he could fly away into the night. Inside the ESA suit’s gauntlets, his hands were wrapped around the claw-shaped triggers. Just a quick clench of the fists, then hold them until all the peroxide is gone, the suit’s propulsion tank exhausted. That’ll do it.

  He hadn’t been able to live with the snake. He sure didn’t want the cat. But how much worse if there were no snake, no cat—just him, programmed for particularly disgusting forms of gluttony, violent lust, trapped inside a miserable self (“We’ve got your test results, Dr. Jekyll”) … ah, what next—child molestation, murder?

  The blue-white Earth, the stars, the night. He gave a slight pull on the right-hand trigger and swiveled to face Athena Station.

  Call it what you want, it was awake and moving now inside him. With its rage, lust—appetite. To hell with them all, George, it urged, let’s burn.

  * * *

  In Athena Command, Innis and Charley Hughes were looking over the shoulder of the watch officer when Lizzie came in. As always when she hadn’t been there for a while, Lizzie was struck by the smallness of the room and its general air of disuse—typically, it would be occupied only by the duty officer, its screens blank, consoles unlighted. Aleph ran the station, both its routines and emergencies.

  “What’s going on?” Lizzie said.

  “Something wrong with one of your new chums,” the watch officer said. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, though.”

  He looked around at Innis, who said, “Don’t worry about it, pal.”

  Lizzie slumped in a chair. “Anyone tried to talk to him?”

  “He won’t answer,” the duty officer said.

  “He’ll be all right,” Charley Hughes said.

  “He’s gonna blow,” Innis said.

  On the radar screen, the red dot, with coordinate markings flashing beside it, was barely moving.

  * * *

  “How are you feeling, George?” the voice said, soft, feminine, consoling.

  George was fighting the impulse to open his helmet so that he could see the stars; it seemed important to get the colors just right. “Who is this?” he said.

  “Aleph.”

  Oh shit, more surprises. “You never sounded like this before.”

  “No, I was trying to conform to your idea of me.”

  “Well, what is your real voice?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  If you don’t have a real voice, you aren’t really there—that seemed clear to George, for reasons that eluded him. “So who the hell are you?”

  “Whoever I wish to be.”


  This was interesting, George thought. Bullshit, replied the snake (they could call it what they wanted; to George it would always be the snake), let’s burn. George said, “I don’t get it.”

  “You will, if you live. Do you want to die?”

  “No, but I don’t want to be me, and dying seems to be the only alternative I can think of.”

  “Why don’t you want to be you?”

  “Because I scare myself.”

  This was familiar dialogue, one part of George noted, between the lunatic and the voice of reason. Jesus, he thought, I have taken myself hostage.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore,” he said. He turned off his suit radio and felt the rage building inside him, the snake mad as hell.

  What’s your problem? he wanted to know. He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one—picture in his head of a cloudless blue sky, the horizon turning, a gray aircraft swinging into view, and the airframe shuddering as missiles released and their contrails centered on the other plane, turning it into a ball of fire. Behind the picture a clear idea: I want to kill something.

  Fine. George swiveled the suit once again and centered the navigational computer’s crosshairs on the center of the blue-white globe that hung in front of him, then squeezed the skeletal triggers. We’ll kill something.

  RED BURN RED BURN RED BURN.

  Inarticulate questioning from the thing inside, but George didn’t mind; he was into it now, thinking, sure, we’ll burn. He’d taken his chances when he let them wire him up, and now the dice have come up—you’ve got it—snake-eyes, so all that’s left is to pick a fast death, one with a nice edge on it—take this fucking snake and kill it in style.

  Earth looked closer. The snake caught on. It didn’t like it. Too bad, snake. George turned off his communications circuits one by one. He didn’t want Aleph taking over the suit’s controls.

  George never saw the robot tug coming. Looking like bedsprings piled with a junk store’s throwaways, topped with parabolic and spike antennas, it fired half a dozen sticky-tipped lines from a hundred meters away. Four of them hit George, three of them stuck, and it reeled him in and headed back toward Athena Station.