The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Maria’s deportation probably saves us from the bombs,” was all my doctor said when she told me about it. “What would be the point now?”

  Eventually I dozed off, and for the last time I was working to build walls. They were mostly high now in that dream, surfaced and smooth, and I could see people – or things, I could not be sure when I looked closely – walking along the tops of those walls. For some reason I knew not to look too closely or for too long. I held tightly to the rocks in my arms. I concentrated on my work.

  When I came to the unfinished part of the wall and after I had handed my rocks up to men working above me, I could see out across the valley if I stood on tiptoe. It lay completely flat now, flatter than it had even been. It looked paved. There were no buildings. There were no roads. There were no habitations and nothing natural to be seen. The white paving on the valley floor shined brightly in the moonlight, and in the south something was eating at the mountains. I could not see the Oquirrhs. To the west, everything was completely flat and silent. Wind hissed over the smooth paving.

  The next morning, x-rays showed that the anomaly in my left lung had not grown, and it did not grow the day after that either. The radiation had stopped it. They started treating everyone with it, and soon they found that lower doses repeated over several days worked just as well. I underwent surgery for the last time to remove the dead nano-construct in my lung.

  They never did find Maria Consuela de Alvarez. But eventually, of course, the entire world knew everywhere she had gone in her last days, even what she had looked at and where she had turned her head. The bus the INS had transported her in and the bus she had taken to her village south of Nogales had both apparently been hot and without air-conditioning. They had ridden with the windows open. Maria had had a window seat on the right-hand side of the bus all the way from Salt Lake to Nogales, then on the left-hand side in Sonora. We know that, of course, because of all the bizarre machines that grew along the roadsides in Utah and Arizona and Sonora wherever she had coughed out the window. Mr. Schumberg’s projects had combined with the other projects escaped from his laboratory to create monstrous machines they had never intended. The army and National Guard had quickly killed, if that’s what you call it, the ones in America with radiation and fire.

  My sister called from Minneapolis. She had been trying to call me, and had finally reached Alyson, home again after being stuck in traffic on the roads for a day and a half. “Why didn’t you call me?” my sister asked.

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “How can I not worry about you? You’re my big brother. You used to take me to parties with your friends and made me feel older and grown up. You read all the Jane Austen novels to me and taught me how to dance. I’m flying out to take care of you as soon as they lift the quarantine.”

  And she did come. It was my sister who drove me home from the hospital. She was the first person I cooked the rigatoni pesto for.

  My sister stayed for two weeks. We had long talks over coffee on the back porch, and we looked at pictures of when we were kids. I slept a lot. She took me to follow-up appointments with my doctor and with specialists from the CDC. One night she invited Alyson and her kids over and cooked dinner. She helped me manage the requests for interviews from all over the world including, of course, the one for this story about how I had met Maria. My sister bought me a new cap after my hair fell out from the radiation treatment.

  Lawyers from all over the country were also contacting me. I did not join the class-action lawsuit – my lawyers felt I had a chance at a huge settlement on my own. The intern had been right. But if I lived to see money at the end of the litigation I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. Take my sister to Paris, maybe. Or to Rome.

  I had looked up Bernard Schumberg in the telephone book, of course, so I had Mrs. Schumberg’s number and address, but I had hesitated to call to offer condolences. I had not sent flowers. Finally, the day before my sister was to fly home, I had her drive me to the Schumbergs’. Their house was on a shady street in a nice neighborhood on the east bench. It was a small turn-of-the-century Victorian. The yard was neat and well kept. The last of the lilacs were blooming in the back yard.

  I carried a bouquet of carnations and went alone to the door and knocked. After a moment, I heard someone inside. The door opened, and it was Mrs. Schumberg. Tears came at once to her eyes, and I could not keep them back either. I handed her the flowers and I wiped my eyes and she invited me in. She was wearing a scarf to hide her bald head. Of course she had had to have radiation treatments, I thought. How could she not have picked up the nanomachines?

  I told her that I could not stay long, that my sister was waiting in the car. Mrs. Schumberg did not invite her in, so I knew that I had done the right thing by leaving my sister there. It was too soon for Mrs. Schumberg to see people.

  We did not know what to say to each other. “He was a good man,” she said finally.

  “He loved you,” I said. “He couldn’t stand it if you weren’t with him. You were so good to him.”

  I left quickly.

  I bought all the books with photographs of the nanomachines in the deserts, but I keep looking at the pictures of what they turned into in Sonora. We mostly don’t know what they were. We have ideas on some. They had longer to work in Sonora, so everything there was bigger and more elaborate. The plans of all those different projects in Mr. Schumberg’s laboratory had combined in so many unexpected ways. In their short time, the nanomachines in Sonora had “learned” more than anyone could have predicted. Some of the constructs looked like nothing more than beautiful modern sculpture. Others blended into the landscape and could be found only with heat signatures. Some were enormous, clawed horrors lurking in side canyons that, had they lived, would have begun to walk about the land to hunt and take what they needed. None of them “lived” long.

  But the barren white paving over what had once been Maria’s village haunts me the most. It concealed an enormous transmitter that had been calling the stars for eight days before they killed it. No one has been able to crack the code of those transmissions. We don’t know what it was saying. We don’t know what it was calling. We don’t know why its transmissions were beamed at only three stars in alternating order. We don’t know what will happen because of it.

  The world is mostly afraid of the answers to those questions. But I look at the pictures of that smooth paving and wonder. Inside that construct, part of whatever it was, was all that had made up Maria Consuela de Alvarez, a little woman who had found the courage to smuggle herself here to try to better her condition. She had taken a job no one else had wanted. She had come in the night to help sick people.

  I don’t know if any part of her could have survived to influence what was happening to her and her village. I could not have influenced what was growing inside of me, I know that. But if the construct had listened to Maria before it killed her, if it had tried to understand her (if it had had that ability), maybe the transmissions were calling angels to Earth, not devils. I’d like to live long enough to find out.

  THE COOKIE MONSTER

  Vernor Vinge

  Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Vernor Vinge now lives in San Diego, California, where he is an associate professor of math sciences at San Diego State University. He sold his first story, “Apartness,” to New Worlds in 1965; it immediately attracted a good deal of attention, was picked up for Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr’s collaborative World’s Best Science Fiction anthology the following year, and still strikes me as one of the strongest stories of that entire period. Since this impressive debut, he has become a frequent contributor to Analog; he has also sold to Orbit, Far Frontiers, If, Stellar, and other markets. His novella “True Names,” which is famous in internet circles and among computer enthusiasts well outside of the usual limits of the genre, and is cited by some as having been the real progenitor of cyberpunk rather than William Gibson’s Neuromancer, was a finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo Awar
ds in 1981. His novel A Fire Upon the Deep, one of the most epic and sweeping of modern Space Operas, won him a Hugo Award in 1993; its sequel, A Deepness in the Sky, won him another Hugo Award in 2000, and his novella “Fast Times at Fairmont High” won another Hugo in 2003 . . . and these days Vinge is regarded as one of the best of the American “hard science” writers, along with people such as Greg Bear and Gregory Benford. His other books include the novels Tatja Grimm’s World, The Witling, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime (which have been released in an omnibus volume as Across Realtime), and the collections True Names and Other Dangers and Threats and Other Promises. His most recent book is the massive collection The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge.

  Vinge has become famous well outside normal genre circles in recent years for his speculations about “The Singularity” (the point waiting ahead for us all where technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it) – a speculation that has been named a “Vingian Singularity” in his honor, and which has deeply influenced the work of most of the best of the new “hard SF” writers (especially noticeable in the work of writers such as Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow). In the thought-provoking novella that follows, Vinge gives us an unsettling glimpse of what it might be like to live in a post-singularity society, where life turns out to be quite challenging – and full of surprises.

  “SO HOW DO YOU like the new job?”

  Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.

  “It beats flipping burgers, Victor,” she said.

  Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. “Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast.”

  Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at LotsaTech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. “Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day.” Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. “If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket.”

  “That’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind.”

  Grr. “Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer.”

  Victor smirked. “Good point.” He thought a second, then continued more quietly, “But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the Bruin. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweatshops’ or ‘Death by Boredom’. I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,” – he lowered his voice another notch – “I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience.”

  “And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?”

  Victor’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful . . . at least for another day or two.” The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. “I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit.”

  That figures. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. “Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?”

  Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.

  After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.

  Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr. Johnson – the guy running the familiarization course – was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.

  It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.

  Dixie Mae had never done customer support before this; till she took Prof. Reich’s tests last week, her highest-paying job really had been flipping burgers. But like the world and your Aunt Sally, she had often been the victim of customer support. Dixie Mae would buy a new book or a cute dress, and it would break or wouldn’t fit – and then when she wrote customer support, they wouldn’t reply, or had useless canned answers, or just tried to sell her something more – all the time talking about how their greatest goal was serving the customer.

  But now LotsaTech was turning all that around. Their top bosses had realized how important real humans were to helping real human customers. They were hiring hundreds and hundreds of people like Dixie Mae. They weren’t paying very much, and this first week had been kinda tough since they were all cooped up here during the crash intro classes.

  But Dixie Mae didn’t mind. “LotsaTech is a lot of Tech.” Before, she’d always thought that motto was stupid. But LotsaTech was big; it made IBM and Microsoft look like minnows. She’d been a little nervous about that, imagining that she’d end up in a room bigger than a football field with tiny office cubicles stretching away to the horizon. Well, Building 0994 did have tiny cubicles, but her team was just fifteen nice people – leaving Victor aside for the moment. Their work floor had windows all the way around, a panoramic view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Los Angeles basin. And li’l ol’ Dixie Mae Leigh had her a desk right beside one of those wide windows! I’ll bet there are CEO’s who don’t have a view as good as mine. Here’s where you could see a little of what the Lotsa in LotsaTech meant. Just outside of BO994 there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. Dozens of similar buildings were scattered across the hillside. A golf course covered the next hill over, and more company land lay beyond that. These guys had the money to buy the top off Runyon Canyon and plunk themselves down on it. And this was just the LA branch office.

  Dixie Mae had grown up in Tarzana. On a clear day in the valley, you could see the Santa Monica mountains stretching off forever into the haze. They seemed beyond her reach, like something from a fairy tale. And now she was up here. Next week, she’d bring her binoculars to work, go over on the north slope, and maybe spot where her father still lived down there.

  Meanwhile, back to work. The next six queries were easy, from people who hadn’t even bothered to read the single page of directions that came with Voxalot. Letters like those would be hard to answer politely the thousandth time she saw them. But she would try – and today she practiced with cheerful specifics that stated the obvious and gently pointed the customers to where they could find more. Then came a couple of brain twisters. Damn. She wouldn’t be able to finish those today. Mr. Johnson said “finish anything you start on the same day” – but maybe he would let her work on those first thing Monday morning. She really wanted to do well on the hard ones. Every day, there would be the same old dumb questions. But there would also be hard new questions. And eventually she’d get really, really good with Voxalot. More important, she’d get good about managing questions and organization. So what that she’d screwed the last seven years of her life and never made it through college? Little by little she would improve herself, till a few years from now her past stupidities wouldn’t matter anymore. Some people had told her that such things weren’t possible nowadays, that you really needed the college degree. But people had always been able to make it with hard work. Back in the twent
ieth century, lots of steno pool people managed it. Dixie Mae figured customer support was pretty much the same kind of starting point.

  Nearby, somebody gave out a low whistle. Victor. Dixie Mae ignored him.

  “Dixie Mae, you gotta see this.”

  Ignore him.

  “I swear Dixie, this is a first. How did you do it? I got an incoming query for you, by name! Well, almost.”

  “What!? Forward it over here, Victor.”

  “No. Come around and take a look. I have it right in front of me.”

  Dixie Mae was too short to look over the partition. Jeez.

  Three steps took her into the corridor. Ulysse Green poked her head out of her cubicle, an inquisitive look on her face. Dixie Mae shrugged and rolled her eyes, and Ulysse returned to her work. The sound of fingers on keys was like occasional raindrops (no Voxalots allowed in cubicle-land). Mr. Johnson had been around earlier, answering questions and generally making sure things were going okay. Right now he should be back in his office on the other side of the building; this first day, you hardly needed to worry about slackers. Dixie Mae felt a little guilty about making that a lie, but . . .

  She popped into Victor’s cubicle, grabbed a loose chair. “This better be good, Victor.”

  “Judge for yourself, Dixie Mae.” He looked at his display. “Oops, I lost the window. Just a second.” He dinked around with his mouse. “So, have you been putting your name on outgoing messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happening – ”

  “No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way.” The fake signature was built into her “send” key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in Lahore or Londonderry – or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.