What did I think of Anna-Lee?
“I don’t see why she’s complaining. I’ve seen to it that Janis just isn’t her problem any more.”
Wasn’t what I did stealing?
“It’s not stealing to free a slave.”
And so on. It was the same sort of routine I’d been practicing on my parents all these years, and the practice paid off. Entire cadres—hundreds of them—signed petitions asking that the case be dismissed. Lots of adults did the same.
I hope that it helps, but the judge that hears the case isn’t supposed to be swayed by public opinion, but only by the law.
And everyone forgets that it’s my parents that will be on trial, not me, accused of letting their software steal Anna-Lee’s software. And of course I, and therefore they, am completely guilty, so my parents are almost certainly going to be fined, and lose both money and Citizenship Points.
I’m sorry about that, but my parents seem not to be.
How the judge will put a value on a piece of stolen software that its owner fully intended to destroy is going to make an interesting ruling, however it turns out.
I don’t know whether I’ll ever set foot on Earth again. I can’t take my place in Pisa because I’m not incarnated, and I don’t know if they’ll offer again.
And however things turn out, Fritz is still zeroed. And I still wear blue.
I don’t have my outside job any longer. Dane won’t speak to me, because his supervisor reprimanded him, and he’s under suspicion for being my accomplice. And even those who are sympathetic to me aren’t about to let me loose with their computers.
And even if I get a job somewhere, I can’t be incarnated until the court case is over.
It seems to me that the only person who got away scot-free was Janis. Which is normal.
So right now my chief problem is boredom. I spent fourteen years in a rigid program intended to fill my hours with wholesome and intellectually useful activity, and now that’s over.
And I can’t get properly started on the non-wholesome thing until I get an incarnation somewhere.
Everyone is, or hopes to be, an idler.
Thank you, Doctor Sam.
I’m choosing to idle away my time making pictures. Maybe I can sell them and help pay the Earth tax.
I call them my “Doctor Johnson” series. Sam. Johnson on Mars. Sam. Johnson Visits Neptune. Sam. Johnson Quizzing the Tomasko Glacier. Sam. Johnson Among the Asteroids.
I have many more ideas along this line.
Doctor Sam, I trust you will approve.
<
* * * *
FAR AS YOU CAN GO
Greg Van Eekhout
New writer Greg Van Eekhout has made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Polyphony, Flytrap, Say… ldeomancer, Starlight, and elsewhere. Many of those stories have just been released in his first collection, Show and Tell and Other Stories. When not writing, Van Eekhout works as an instructional designer and an educational technologist in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.
In the aptly named story that follows, we set out in company with a determined man on a quest who goes just about as far as you can go in a bizarre and constrained future world—and if that’s not far in today’s terms, that certainly doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have to overcome plenty of dangers and obstacles along the way, or encounter not a few wonders.
* * * *
I didn’t go to school because I was allergic to the neuroboosters, but that didn’t mean I was stupid. It just meant I had a lot of time on my hands. Mostly, I hung out with Beeman, scrap-combing all over Ex-Town and trading metal and electronic bits and whatever for food and goods and services. We were good businessmen.
Beeman was a robot, only it didn’t matter so much to me because all the skin on his face was torn away so you could see his plastic cheeks and hear the whiz-whirr of his eyes when they moved. This made him okay, because he wasn’t pretending to be a person or anything else he wasn’t. He wasn’t trying to be fake.
We were going over our day’s take the afternoon that I first smelled the Far-away. The gray outlines of the downtown towers faded into the sky like sick ghosts, and over our heads, police stingers whined, invisible in the haze. Beeman and I sat with our backs against a crumbled section of concrete wall. At my feet was a can of split-pea soup, not too far out of date, a couple of nine volt batteries, a coil of O-net cable, and two stainless steel rods that were maybe chopsticks.
“Good trade,” Beeman said, his words beginning and ending with a little click that I wished would go away. The click hadn’t always been there in his speech, but I figured his voicebox was a little broken.
“Except for the soup,” I said. “I’ll bring that home to my mom.”
“Your mom is fat and eats too much.”
“Shut your grill.” I banged the soup can against his head, but not hard enough to dent either. Beeman wasn’t trying to be mean. He just had some bad lines of code.
I was about to explain that my mom didn’t eat too much, but the stuff she got from her job at the shoe factory had too much fat and carbohydrate content. I didn’t know how to explain carbohydrates to Beeman. Like a battery with too much juice, and not good juice? But then there was this gust of wind, not hot and sticky like normal Ex-Town wind, but cool, like opening the refrigerator, and strange and salty.
“What the fuck is that?” I said.
Beeman activated his olfactories—we thought he might have been some kind of domestic servant with kitchen duties before he lost his face and came this way—and I kept my mouth shut while he did some analysis. After a while, he said, “I’ll show you.”
He pulled up his T-shirt, which he wore not to be fake, but to help keep dirt out of the cracks in his torso, and displayed an image from his media library on the LCD screen above his left nipple-hatch. It showed a big blue field, like the sky on a good day, only made of liquid, rolling with white foam. Clean white birds dove into it. It looked like another world, empty, no clutter, no choking haze, no jagged concrete or melted mounds of spray-form construction. Just peaceful, going all the way out to the clean horizon.
“It’s the sea,” said Beeman. “We’re smelling the sea.”
* * * *
It didn’t last long. The freak wind died, and soon Ex-Town smelled like Ex-Town again, and I felt weirdly achy, like something had been stolen from me. I wanted more of the sea, and I told Beeman that I wished we could go to the ocean, and he shrugged and said, “Why can’t we?”
There were so many reasons why we couldn’t go, but I let him run on. He said we could wade into the water. We could dig for shellfish. We could build a crab trap and make a driftwood fire and cook the crabs in the fire. We could even go fishing.
“Fishing,” he said, “is when—“
“I know what fishing is.” Just because I didn’t go to school didn’t mean I didn’t know anything. I still went through programs and read, so I knew that fishing is when you try to kill a fish by tricking it with food, only it’s not just food but also a deadly hook, and when the fish bites into your hook you remove the fish from its environment, and that’s what kills it.
I told him I was all for it, but I’d have to stop by home first and gather some supplies. Which was really just my way of putting Beeman off. I wasn’t going anywhere, definitely not off to some beach that might as well have been on the Moon. But I didn’t tell Beeman straight up, because once his brain got stuck in a loop, he could be really annoying. Like the time he told me we were going to slay dragons. He had some stories in his memory, and sometimes they leaked out and he took them for real, so for a whole week we couldn’t do a thing without him telling me to look out for dragons and saying what we’d do if we found a dragon and warning me that dragons were all this and dragons were all that, and it didn’t stop until he accidentally touched a non-insulated wire and got a little jolt that finally shut him up.
So, I avoided Beeman
for the better part of a week. Which wasn’t fun, because without Beeman, I couldn’t come up with an excuse not to spend more time at home.
When Mom wasn’t at the shoe factory lacing shoes, she was on the couch, watching TV. There were always burning houses on the screen, and burning palm trees, with flames shooting from the fronds like torches in a traveling Frankenstein electric show.
“I smelled the ocean,” I called to her from the stove as I opened the can of pea soup me and Beeman had salvaged earlier. The soup shlorped out of the can in a waxy, cylindrical blob. I mushed it down with a spoon. “It was just for a minute,” I said, “but it smelled nice.” I stirred, smoothing the soup out. “My friend Beeman says he knows how to get there, to the beach. He says it’s nice. I think maybe he used to live there, before he… before he got sick and came to Ex-Town.” Mom knew I had a friend named Beeman, but that’s all she knew about him.
The soup got more liquidy and looked more like food. When it started to bubble, I turned down the heat, poured a bowl for Mom and half a cup for myself, and took it out to the living room.
Mom was still staring at the TV. Now it was a hospital ER, with people brought in bleeding. The announcer was talking about a dust girl attack. I turned the volume down and set Mom’s soup on a tray in front of her. I checked her pulse and pupils to make sure she hadn’t had a stroke, but she was okay. She’d come off a seventeen-hour shift, so she was just crashing from the pump they put in her drink to keep her going. I put her hand on the spoon and she started to feed herself.
“Beeman says we could catch fish right out of the sea. He said the silver ones are safe to eat, on account of being bred with good livers. And as for where we’d sleep, Beeman knows of some caves in the rocks.” I dabbed green soup from the corner of Mom’s mouth.
That night, I slept on the roof of our building. When the sun came up, I went out and traded some electronics for preserves. I spent the rest of the day throwing rocks and jabbing the air with a sharp metal rod. I stayed out till dark. When I came home, Mom was still sitting there, bathing her face in the cancer-light of the TV. She hadn’t moved.
“I think I’m going to go with Beeman,” I said. “Do you want to come?”
Half of me wanted her to say “Yes,” because I didn’t want to leave her alone. And half of me wanted her to say “No,” because it would be a long trip, and I didn’t think she could make it. And also, what Beeman was saying about the beach might be total bullshit, not because he was lying, but because of his damage and foul code.
But Mom didn’t say anything at all.
I went to my bunkbox and removed some of my better salvage, stuff I was saving for when I thought I could get the best trade for it, or for when I really needed it. I left it in a pile on the kitchen counter and wrote out a note: Mom, I’m out walking with Beeman. We’re trying to find the sea. You can sell this stuff if you want. Thanks for the food and shelter and stuff. I love you very much. Don’t wait up.
* * * *
I met up with Beeman in the stairwell he was staying in because it had a live power socket that he could reach with an extension cord. Without saying anything, he unplugged and stood and went down the stairs and started walking. I followed him outside into the glowing night.
I had a backpack full of Snarfits and Nutzitz and Fritos and bottles of water. Beeman traveled light. He had his salvage bag, but he wouldn’t tell me what was in it, except to say he’d visited an alchemist, which, from his explanation, I figured was maybe a little like a drug maker. Drugs were good trade.
“You really know the way?” I asked.
“Yes.”
We kept to the rat trails on the outskirts of the garbage mounds. Rubber bits and plastic pebbles skittered down the slopes, dislodged by rodents and dogs. Beeman’s eyes flicked nervously, taking dozens of pics and analyzing them for threat, such as poker-heads or dust girls or pigs or cops.
“And we can eat the fish? And live in caves?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But how come you can remember stuff about the ocean when you can’t remember other stuff, like how you got to Ex-Town, or what happened to your face? How can you remember the way when you don’t even have a map?”
He was silent for a little bit, processing. Our feet crunched too loudly on the oily gravel path. The air smelled yellow.
“It is not down on any map. True places never are.” I had no response to that. “That’s Moby-Dick” he said. Still no response from me. There was just the click of his camera eyes.
“Alright,” he said at last. “I know the path, but I don’t know the way.”
I stopped in my tracks. He stopped, too, watching me. The sky was orange above us. Small things burrowed in the garbage. Screams and moans floated on the warm wind. It was always like this in Ex-Town.
I closed my eyes and remembered the clean tang of the sea.
“Let’s just keep going,” I said.
Beeman nodded. If he still had lips, I think he would have smiled.
By sunrise we’d made it out to the quarry, a shallow crater stretching for miles in all directions. Machines with throaty coughs picked through slabs of concrete and sorted them in gigantic bins on the backs of trucks.
“We go around?” I asked.
“No. Through.”
“What if we run into quarrymen?”
“Two choices,” Beeman said. “First: We try to buy them off with your food and water.”
“Then what would I eat?”
“That’s the wrong question,” Beeman said. “Instead, ask what the quarrymen will eat if they catch us.”
“I’m a faster runner than you are, you know.”
“That’s why the second choice is: Let’s not get caught.”
We crunched along.
* * * *
“I’m starting to remember things.” Beeman led the way through a maze of rubble piles, fat drops of rain plinking on his flesh. We both wrapped ourselves in sheets of plastic, because it wasn’t good to get rain on you, no matter what you were made of. The plastic also helped hide Beeman’s stripped robot face from the small groups of people clustered around can fires. We didn’t want anyone attacking us and taking Beeman’s eyes for scrap.
“Are you remembering anything useful?”
He nodded with a little scrunchy sound in his neck joints. “Things we might encounter on our way. Things to look out for.”
“That’s useful,” I agreed.
He guided us around a cloud of junk gas hugging the ground. “The lands between Ex-Town and the good places are unsettled. They follow the rules of neither place. There could be ronin—knights with no lords.” These words didn’t mean much to me, but then Beeman said they were like dust girls with no queen, and I got what he meant.
“These are just flashes of memory,” he said. “I just know I’ve seen these things before, maybe the first time I crossed over to Ex-Town.”
“So you don’t know any good tricks for them?”
He whirred and clicked for a long time. Then, “Maybe you should turn back,” he said.
I know Beeman didn’t have feelings. All he had were behaviors. But so what? My mom had emotions, but they were so beat down by living and lacing shoes and taking pump that you could hardly tell. If programmed behaviors made you act like a friend, made you do the things a friend did, wasn’t that just as good as having feelings? Beeman was my friend, and I didn’t need for him to be anything he wasn’t.
I think there’s something inside us—a lot of us, anyway—that tells us to get out, to find faraway places, to seek adventure, like in Beeman’s fractured stories. But what happens when there’s no place to go? When everything’s the same, no matter where you head. I think that’s how people end up like my mom. It’s like there’s a bird in them, but the bird can’t fly, so it just bounces around the walls of their own hearts until its bones are broken.
Maybe Beeman’s sea was no more real than his knights and dragons.
Whatev
er. I didn’t want to die of broken bones.
* * * *
I felt the vibration before I heard anything, a tremor beneath my feet and a queasy shudder in my gut. Then I heard the growl, deep and low and big. Blue light fanned through the dark, dusty air ahead of us. The faint outline of a spiked dome emerged over the ridge, threads of disturbed junk gas swirling in its wake. It raised wings like great shards of glass into the sky. I tried to swallow, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Is that a dragon?” I managed to ask.
“Watchdrone,” Beeman clicked. “They guard the perimeter here. But, we can call it a dragon. Sure.”
Rusty shrieks gouged my ears as it rolled forward on fleximesh tires. Its “wings” turned out to be broken solar battery chargers, and the spikes on its back were its sensor-comm array. Not a dragon. But it could still spit fire. Swivel-mounted guns on its nose painted me and Beeman with red targeting dots.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 57