"Down came the rain, and washed the spider out."
The bot beamed at him as if he were the only person in the world.
"Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain.
"And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again."
When his arms were once again raised over his head, she giggled and hugged him. He let them fall around her, returning her embrace. "That's a good girl," he said. "That's my jenny."
The look on his face told me that I had been wrong: this was no act. It was as real to him as it was to me. I had tried hard not to, but I still remembered how the two of us always used to play together, Daddy and Jenny, jen and Dad.
Waiting for Mommy to come home.
He kissed her and she snuggled under the blankets. I felt my eyes stinging.
"But if you do the play," she said, "when will you be back?"
"What play?"
"That one you were telling me. The king and his daughters."
"There's no such play, Jenny." He sifted her black curls through his hands. "I'll never leave you, don't worry now. Never again." He rose unsteadily and caught himself on the chest of drawers.
"Nighty noodle," said the bot.
"Pleasant dreams, sweetheart," said my father. "I love you."
"I love you too."
I expected him to say something to me, but he didn't even seem to realize that I was still in the room. He shambled across the playroom, opened the door to his bedroom and went in.
"I'm sorry about that," said the bot, speaking again as an adult.
"Don't be," I said. I coughed-something in my throat. "It was fine. I was very ... touched."
"He's usually a lot happier. Sometimes he works in the garden." The bot pulled the blankets aside and swung her legs out of the bed. "He likes to vacuum."
"Yes."
"I take good care of him."
I nodded and reached for my purse. "I can see that." I had to go. "Is it enough?"
She shrugged. "He's my daddy."
"I meant the money. Because if it's not, I'd like to help."
"Thank you. He'd appreciate that."
The front door opened for me, but I paused before stepping out into Strawberry Fields. "What about ... after?"
"When he dies? My bond terminates. He said he'd leave the house to me. I know you could contest that, but I'll need to sell in order to pay for my twenty-year maintenance."
"No, no. That's fine. You deserve it."
She came to the door and looked up at me, little Jen Fancy and the woman she would never become.
"You know, it's you he loves," she said. "I'm just a stand-in."
"He loves his little girl," I said. "Doesn't do me any good-I'm forty-seven."
"It could if you let it." She frowned. "I wonder if that's why Mother did all this. So you'd find out."
"Or maybe she was just plain sorry." I shook my head. She was a smart woman, my mom. I would've liked to have known her.
"So, Ms. Fancy, maybe you can visit us again sometime." The bot grinned and shook my hand. "Daddy's usually in a good mood after his nap. He sits out front on his beach chair and waits for the ice cream truck. He always buys us some. Our favorite is Yellow Submarine. It's vanilla with fat butterscotch swirls, dipped in white chocolate. I know it sounds kind of odd, but it's good."
"Yes," I said absently, thinking about all the things Mom had told me about my father. I was hearing them now for the first time. "That might be nice."
A Spy in Europa
Alastair Reynolds
Here's a headlong, relentlessly paced adventure, set against the backdrop of a strange high-tech society inside the moon Europa, which proves that where you end up might not be at all where you thought you were heading ... and that what you accomplish might not exactly be what you set out to do.
New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone and has also sold to Asimov's Science Fiction and elsewhere. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands.
Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free fall before the flitter's engines kicked in, slamming it away from the Deucalion. His pilot gunned the craft toward the moon below, quickly outrunning the other shuttles which the Martian liner bad disgorged. Europa seemed to be enlarging perceptibly; a flattening are the colour of nicotine-stained wallpaper. "Boring, isn't it."
Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. "You'd rather they were shooting at us?"
"Rather they were doing something."
"Then you're a fool," Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers. "There's enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red spot. What it would do to us doesn't bear thinking about it."
"Only trying to make conversation."
"Don't bother-it's an overrated activity at the best of times."
"All right, Marius-I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a fucking 200-page report on it. Satisfied?"
"I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature."
But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the Europan Demarchy, traffic management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it into a touchdown corridor. In three days Mishenka would return, but then he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.
"Not too late to abort," Mishenka said, a long time later.
"Are you out of your tiny mind?"
The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. "We've all heard what the Demarchy do to spies, Marius."
"Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?"
"I'll leave being psychotic to you, Marius-you're so much better at it."
Vargovic nodded. It was the first sensible thing Mishenka had said all day.
They landed an hour later. Vargovic adjusted his Martian businesswear, tuning his holographically inwoven frock coat to project red sandstorms; lifting the collar in what he had observed from the liner's passengers was a recent Martian fad. Then he grabbed his bag-nothing incriminating there; no gadgets or weapons and exited the flitter, stepping through the gasket of locks. A slitherwalk propelled him forward, massaging the soles of his slippers. It was a single cultured ribbon of octopus skin, stimulated to ripple by the timed firing of buried squid axons.
To get to Europa you bad to be either sickeningly rich or sickeningly poor. Vargovic's cover was the former: a lie excusing the single-passenger flitter. As the slitherwalk advanced he was joined by other arrivals: business people like himself, and a sugaring of the merely wealthy. Most of them had dispensed with holographics, instead projecting entoptics beyond their personal space; machine-generated hallucinations decoded by the implant hugging Vargovic's optic nerve. Hummingbirds and seraphim were in sickly vogue. Others were attended by autonomous perfumes which subtly altered the moods of those around them. Slightly lower down the social scale, Vargovic observed a clique of noisy tourists-antlered brats from Circum-love. Then there was a discontinuous jump: squalid-looking Mounder refugees, who must have accepted indenture to the Demarchy. The refugees were quickly segregated from the more affluent immigrants, who found themselves within a huge geodesic dome, resting above the ice on refrigerated stilts. The walls of the dome glittered with duty-free shops, boutiques and bars. The floor was bowl-shaped, slitherwalks and spiral stairways descending to the nadir, where a quincunx of fluted marble cylinders waited. Vargovic observed that the newly arrived were queuing for elevators which terminated in the cylinders. He joined a line and waited.
"First time in Cadmus-Asterius?" asked the bearded man ahead of him, indophores in his plum-coloured jacket projecting Boolean propositions from Sirikit's Machine Ethics in the Transenlightenmen
t. "First time on Europa, actually. First time Circum-love, you want the full story."
"Down-system?"
"Mars."
The man nodded gravely. "Hear it's tough."
"You're not kidding." And he wasn't. Since the sun had dimmed-the second Mounder minimum, repeating the behaviour which the sun had exhibited in the 17th century-the entire balance of power in the First System had altered. The economies of the inner worlds had found it hard to adjust; agriculture and powergeneration handicapped, with concomitant social upheaval. But the outer planets had never had the luxury of solar energy in the first place. Now Circum-love was the benchmark of First System economic power, with Circum-Saturn trailing behind. Because of this, the two primary Circum-love superpowers-the Demarchy, which controlled Europa and lo, and Gilgamesh Isis, which controlled Ganymede, and parts of Callisto-were vying for dominance. The man smiled keenly. "Here for anything special?"
"Surgery," Vargovic said, hoping to curtail the conversation at the earliest juncture. "Very extensive anatomical surgery."
They hadn't told him much.
"Her name is Cholok," Control had said, after Vargovic had skimmed the dossiers back in the caverns which housed the Covert Operations section of Gilgamesh Isis security, deep in Ganymede. "We recruited her ten years ago, when she was on Phobos."
"And now she's Demarchy?"
Control had nodded. "She was swept up in the braindrain, once Mounder II began to bite. The smartest got out while they could. The Demarchy-and us, of course-snapped up the brightest."
"And also one of our sleepers." Vargovic glanced down at the portrait of the woman, striped by video lines. She looked mousey to him, with a permanent bone-deep severity of expression.
"Cheer up," Control said. "I'm asking you to contact her, not sleep with her."
"Yeah, yeah. just tell me her background."
"Biotech." Control nodded at the dossier. "On Phobos she led one of the teams working in aquatic transform work-modifying the human form for submarine operations."
Vargovic nodded diligently. "Go on."
"Phobos wanted to sell their know-how to the Martians, before their oceans froze. Of course, the Demarchy also appreciated her talents. Cholok took her team to Cadmus-Asterius, one of their hanging cities."
"Hmm." Vargovic was getting the thread now. "By which time we'd already recruited her."
"Right," Control said, "except we had no obvious use for her."
"Then why this conversation?"
Control smiled. Control always smiled when Vargovic pushed the envelope of subservience. "We're having it because our sleeper won't lie down." Then Control reached over and touched the image of Cholok, making her speak. What Vargovic was seeing was an intercept; something Gilgamesh had captured, riddled with edits and jump-cuts.
She appeared to be sending a verbal message to an old friend in Isis. She was talking rapidly from a white room; inert medical servitors behind her. Shelves displayed flasks of colour-coded medichines. A cruciform bed resembled an autopsy slab with ceramic drainage sluices.
"Cholok contacted us a month ago," Control said. "The room's part of her clinic."
"She's using phrase-embedded three," Vargovic said, listening to her speech patterns, siphoning content from otherwise normal Canasian.
"Last code we taught her."
"All right. What's her angle?"
Control chose his words-skating around the information excised from Cholok's message. "She wants to give us something," he said. "Something valuable. She's acquired it accidentally. Someone good has to smuggle it out."
"Hattery will get you everywhere, Control."
The muzak rose to a carefully timed crescendo as the elevator plunged through the final layer of ice. The view around and below was literally dizzying, and Vargovic registered exactly as much awe as befitted his Martian guise.
He knew the Demarchy's history, of course-how the hanging cities had begun as points of entry into the ocean; air-filled observation cupolas linked to the surface by narrow access shafts sunk through the kilometer-thick crustal ice. Scientists had studied the unusual smoothness of the crust, noting that its fracture patterns echoed those on Earth's ice-shelves, implying the presence of a water ocean. Europa was farther from the sun than Earth, but something other than solar energy maintained the ocean's liquidity. Instead, the moon's orbit around Jupiter created stresses which flexed the moon's silicate core, tectonic heat bleeding into the ocean via hydrothermal vents.
Descending into the city was a little like entering an amphitheatre-except that there was no stage; merely an endless succession of steeply tiered lower balconies. They converged toward a light-filled infinity, seven or eight kilometres below, where the city's come shape constricted to a point. The opposite side was half a kilometer away; levels rising like geologic strata. A wide glass tower threaded the atrium from top to bottom, aglow with smoky-green ocean and a mass of kelplike flora, cultured by gilly swimmers. Artificial sunlamps burned in the kelp like Christmas-tree lights. Above, the tower branched; peristaltic feeds reaching out to the ocean proper. Offices, shops, restaurants and residential units were stacked atop each other, or teetered into the abyss on elegant balconies, spun from lustrous sheets of bulk-chitin polymer, the Demarchy's major construction material. Gossamer bridges arced across the atrium space, dodging banners, projections and vast translucent sculptures, moulded from a silky variant of the same chitin polymer. Every visible surface was overlaid by neon, holographics and entoptics.
People were everywhere, and in every face Vargovic detected a slight absence; as if their minds were not entirely focused on the here and now. No wonder: all citizens had an implant which constantly interrogated them, eliciting their opinions on every aspect of Demarchy life, both within Cadmus-Asterius and beyond.
Eventually, it was said, the implant's nagging presence faded from consciousness, until the act of democratic participation became near-involuntary. It revolted Vargovic as much as it intrigued him.
"Obviously," Control said, with judicial deliberation. "What Cholok has to offer isn't merely a nugget-or she'd have given it via PE3."
Vargovic leaned forward. "She hasn't told you?"
"Only that it could endanger the hanging cities."
"You trust her?"
Vargovic felt one of Control's momentary indiscretions coming on. "She may have been sleeping, but she hasn't been completely valueless. There were defections she assisted in ... like the Maunciple job-remember that?"
"If you're calling that a success perhaps it's time I defected."
"Actually, it was Cholok's information which persuaded us to get Maunciple out via the ocean rather than the front door. If Demarchy security had reached Maunciple alive they'd have learnt ten years of tradecraft."
"Whereas instead Maunciple got a harpoon in his back."
"So the operation had its flaws." Control shrugged. "But if you're thinking all this points to Cholok having been compromised ..." Naturally, the thought entered our heads. But if Maunciple had acted otherwise it would have been worse." Control folded his arms. "And of course, he might have made it, in which case even you'd have to admit Cholok's safe."
"Until proven otherwise."
Control brightened. "So you'll do it?"
"Like I have a choice."
"There's always a choice, Vargovic."
Yes, Vargovic thought. There was always a choice ... between doing whatever Gilgamesh Isis asked of him ... and being deprogrammed, cyborgized and sent to work in the sulphur projects around the slopes of Ra Patera. It just wasn't a particularly good one.
"One other thing.."
"Yes?"
"When I've got whatever Cholok has.."
Control half-smiled, the two of them sharing a private joke which did not need illumination. "I'm sure the usual will suffice."
The elevator slowed into immigration.
Demarchy guards hefted big guns, but no one took any interest in him. His story about coming from Mars
was accepted; he was subjected to only the usual spectrum of invasive procedures: neural and genetic patterns scanned for pathologies, body bathed in eight forms of exotic radiation. The final formality consisted of drinking a thimble of chocolate. The beverage consisted of billions of medichines which infiltrated his body, searching for concealed drugs, weapons and illegal biomodifications. He knew that they would find nothing, but was relieved when they reached his bladder and requested to be urinated back into the Demarchy.
The entire procedure lasted six minutes. Outside, Vargovic followed a slitherwalk to the city zoo, and then barged through crowds of schoolchildren until he had arrived at the aquarium where Cholok was meant to meet him. The exhibits were devoted to Europan biota, most of which depended on the ecological niches of the hydrothermal vents, carefully reproduced here. There was nothing very exciting to look at, since most Europan predators looked marginally less fierce than hatstands or lampshades. The commonest were called ventlings-, large and structurally simple animals whose metabolisms hinged on symbiosis. They were pulpy, funnelled bags planted on a tripod of orange stilts, moving with such torpor that Vargovic almost nodded off before Cholok arrived at his side.
She wore an olive-green coat and tight emerald trousers, projecting a haze of medicinal entoptics. Her clenched jaw accentuated the dourness he had gleaned from the intercept.
They kissed. "Good to see you Marius. It's been-what?"
"Nine years, thereabouts."
"How's Phobos these days?"
"Still orbiting Mars." He deployed a smile. "Still a dive."
"You haven't changed."
"Nor you."
At a loss for words, Vargovic found his gaze returning to the informational readout accompanying the ventling exhibit. Only half attentively, he read that the ventlings, motile in their juvenile phase, gradually became sessile in adulthood, stilts thickening with deposited sulphur until they were rooted to the ground like stalagmites. When they died, their soft bodies dispersed into the ocean, but the tripods remained; eerily regular clusters of orange spines concentrated around active vents.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Page 41