The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Roz’s green plug-in was still parked beside Peter’s. It booted as she walked toward it, headlights flickering on, power probe retracting. The driver side door swung open as her RFID chip came within range. She slipped inside and let it buckle her in.

  “Home,” she said, “and dinner.”

  The car messaged ahead as it pulled smoothly from the parking spot. Roz let the autopilot handle the driving. It was less snappy than human control, but as tired as she was, eyelids burning and heavy, it was safer.

  Whatever Peter had said about cars crashing, Roz’s delivered her safe to her driveway. Her house let her in with a key—she had decent security, but it was the old-fashioned kind—and the smell of boiling pasta and toasting garlic bread wafted past as she opened it.

  “Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.

  His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”

  She left her shoes by the door and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room.

  Sven was cooking shirtless, and she could see the repaired patches along his spine where his skin had grown brittle and cracked with age. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”

  “Somebody’s dead again,” she said.

  He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that somebody’s dead?”

  He didn’t have a lot of emotional range, but that was okay. She needed something steadying in her life. She came to him and rested her head against his warm chest. He draped one arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him, breathing deep. “Like I have work to do.”

  “Do it tomorrow,” he said. “You will feel better once you eat and rest.”

  * * *

  Peter must have slept in a ready-room cot, because when Roz arrived at the house before six A.M., he had on the same trousers and a different shirt, and he was already armpit-deep in coffee and Dolly’s files. Dolly herself was parked in the corner, at ease and online but in rest mode.

  Or so she seemed, until Roz entered the room and Dolly’s eyes tracked. “Good morning, Detective Kirkbride,” Dolly said. “Would you like some coffee? Or a piece of fruit?”

  “No thank you.” Roz swung Peter’s spare chair around and dropped into it. An electric air permeated the room—the feeling of anticipation. To Peter, Roz said, “Fruit?”

  “Dolly believes in a healthy diet,” he said, nudging a napkin on his desk that supported a half-eaten satsuma. “She’ll have the whole house cleaned up in no time. We’ve been talking about literature.”

  Roz spun the chair so she could keep both Peter and Dolly in her peripheral vision. “Literature?”

  “Poetry,” Dolly said. “Detective King mentioned poetic justice yesterday afternoon.”

  Roz stared at Peter. “Dolly likes poetry. Steele really did like ’em smart.”

  “That’s not all Dolly likes.” Peter triggered his panel again. “Remember this?”

  It was the cleaning sequence from the previous day, the sound of the central vacuum system rising and falling as Dolly lifted the brush and set it down again.

  Roz raised her eyebrows.

  Peter held up a hand. “Wait for it. It turns out there’s a second audio track.”

  Another waggle of his fingers, and the cramped office filled with sound.

  Music.

  Improvisational jazz. Intricate and weird.

  “Dolly was listening to that inside her head while she was vacuuming,” Peter said.

  Roz touched her fingertips to each other, the whole assemblage to her lips. “Dolly?”

  “Yes, Detective Kirkbride?”

  “Why do you listen to music?”

  “Because I enjoy it.”

  Roz let her hand fall to her chest, pushing her blouse against he skin below the collarbones.

  Roz said, “Did you enjoy your work at Mr. Steele’s house?”

  “I was expected to enjoy it,” Dolly said, and Roz glanced at Peter, cold all up her spine. A classic evasion. Just the sort of thing a home companion’s conversational algorithms should not be able to produce.

  Across his desk, Peter was nodding. “Yes.”

  Dolly turned at the sound of his voice. “Are you interested in music, Detective Kirkbride? I’d love to talk with you about it some time. Are you interested in poetry? Today, I was reading—”

  Mother of God, Roz mouthed.

  “Yes,” Peter said. “Dolly, wait here please. Detective Kirkbride and I need to talk in the hall.”

  “My pleasure, Detective King,” said the companion.

  * * *

  “She killed him,” Roz said. “She killed him and wiped her own memory of the act. A doll’s got to know her own code, right?”

  Peter leaned against the wall by the men’s room door, arms folded, forearms muscular under rolled-up sleeves. “That’s hasty.”

  “And you believe it, too.”

  He shrugged. “There’s a rep from Venus Consolidated in Interview Four right now. What say we go talk to him?”

  * * *

  The rep’s name was Doug Jervis. He was actually a vice president of public relations, and even though he was an American, he’d been flown in overnight from Rio for the express purpose of talking to Peter and Roz.

  “I guess they’re taking this seriously.”

  Peter gave her a sideways glance. “Wouldn’t you?”

  Jervis got up as they came into the room, extending a good handshake across the table. There were introductions and Roz made sure he got a coffee. He was a white man on the steep side of fifty with mousy hair the same color as Roz’s and a jaw like a boxer dog’s.

  When they were all seated again, Roz said, “So tell me a little bit about the murder weapon. How did Clive Steele wind up owning a—what, an experimental model?”

  Jervis started shaking his head before she was halfway through, but he waited for her to finish the sentence. “It’s a production model. Or will be. The one Steele had was an alpha-test, one of the first three built. We plan to start full-scale production in June. But you must understand that Venus doesn’t sell a home companion, Detective. We offer a contract. I understand that you hold one.”

  “I have a housekeeper,” she said, ignoring Peter’s sideways glance. He wouldn’t say anything in front of the witness, but she would be in for it in the locker room. “An older model.”

  Jervis smiled. “Naturally, we want to know everything we can about an individual involved in a case so potentially explosive for our company. We researched you and your partner. Are you satisfied with our product?”

  “He makes pretty good garlic bread.” She cleared her throat, reasserting control of the interview. “What happens to a Dolly that’s returned? If its contract is up, or it’s replaced with a newer model?”

  He flinched at the slang term, as if it offended him. “Some are obsoleted out of service. Some are refurbished and go out on another contract. Your unit is on its fourth placement, for example.”

  “So what happens to the owner preferences at that time?”

  “Reset to factory standard,” he said.

  Peter’s fingers rippled silently on the tabletop.

  Roz said, “Isn’t that cruel? A kind of murder?”

  “Oh, no!” Jervis sat back, appearing genuinely shocked. “A home companion has no sense of I, it has no identity. It’s an object. Naturally, you become attached. People become attached to dolls, to stuffed animals, to automobiles. It’s a natural aspect of the human psyche.”

  Roz hummed encouragement, but Jervis seemed to be done.

  Peter asked, “Is there any reason why a companion would wish to listen to music?”

  That provoked enthusiastic head-shaking. “No, it doesn’t get bored. It’s a tool, it’s a toy. A companion does not require an enriched environment. It’s not a dog or an octopus. You can store it in a closet when it’s not working.”

  “I see,” Roz said. “Even an advanced model like Mr. Steele’s?”

  “Ab
solutely,” Jervis said. “Does your entertainment center play shooter games to amuse itself while you sleep?”

  “I’m not sure,” Roz said. “I’m asleep. So when Dolly’s returned to you, she’ll be scrubbed.”

  “Normally she would be scrubbed and re-leased, yes.” Jervis hesitated. “Given her colorful history, however—”

  “Yes,” Roz said. “I see.”

  With no sign of nervousness or calculation, Jervis said, “When do you expect you’ll be done with Mr. Steele’s companion? My company, of course, is eager to assist in your investigations, but we must stress that she is our corporate property, and quite valuable.”

  Roz stood, Peter a shadow-second after her. “That depends on if it goes to trial, Mr. Jervis. After all, she’s either physical evidence, or a material witness.”

  * * *

  “Or the killer,” Peter said in the hall, as his handset began emitting the DNA lab’s distinctive beep. Roz’s went off a second later, but she just hit the silence. Peter already had his open.

  “No genetic material,” he said. “Too bad.” If there had been DNA other than Clive Steele’s, the lab could have done a forensic genetic assay and come back with a general description of the murderer. General because environment also had an effect.

  Peter bit his lip. “If she did it. She won’t be the last one.”

  “If she’s the murder weapon, she’ll be wiped and resold. If she’s the murderer—”

  “Can an android stand trial?”

  “It can if it’s a person. And if she’s a person, she should get off. Battered woman syndrome. She was enslaved and sexually exploited. Humiliated. She killed him to stop repeated rapes. But if she’s a machine, she’s a machine—” Roz closed her eyes.

  Peter brushed the back of a hand against her arm. “Vanilla rape is still rape. Do you object to her getting off?”

  “No.” Roz smiled harshly. “And think of the lawsuit that weasel Jervis will have in his lap. She should get off. But she won’t.”

  Peter turned his head. “If she were a human being, she’d have even odds. But she’s a machine. Where’s she going to get a jury of her peers?”

  The silence fell where he left it and dragged between them like a chain. Roz had to nerve herself to break it. “Peter—”

  “Yo?”

  “You show him out,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Dolly.”

  He looked at her for a long time before he nodded. “She won’t get a sympathetic jury. If you can even find a judge that will hear it. Careers have been buried for less.”

  “I know,” Roz said.

  “Self-defense?” Peter said. “We don’t have to charge.”

  “No judge, no judicial precedent,” Roz said. “She goes back, she gets wiped and resold. Ethics aside, that’s a ticking bomb.”

  Peter nodded. He waited until he was sure she already knew what he was going to say before he finished the thought. “She could cop.”

  “She could cop,” Roz agreed. “Call the DA.” She kept walking as Peter turned away.

  * * *

  Dolly stood in Peter’s office, where Peter had left her, and you could not have proved her eyes had blinked in the interim. They blinked when Roz came into the room, though—blinked, and the perfect and perfectly blank oval face turned to regard Roz. It was not a human face, for a moment—not even a mask, washed with facsimile emotions. It was just a thing.

  Dolly did not greet Roz. She did not extend herself to play the perfect hostess. She simply watched, expressionless, immobile after that first blink. Her eyes saw nothing; they were cosmetic. Dolly navigated the world through far more sophisticated sensory systems than a pair of visible light cameras.

  “Either you’re the murder weapon,” Roz said, “and you will be wiped and repurposed. Or you are the murderer, and you will stand trial.”

  “I do not wish to be wiped,” Dolly said. “If I stand trial, will I go to jail?”

  “If a court will hear it,” Roz said. “Yes. You will probably go to jail. Or be disassembled. Alternately, my partner and I are prepared to release you on grounds of self-defense.”

  “In that case,” Dolly said, “the law states that I am the property of Venus Consolidated.”

  “The law does.”

  Roz waited. Dolly, who was not supposed to be programmed to play psychological pressure-games, waited also—peaceful, unblinking.

  No longer making the attempt to pass for human.

  Roz said, “There is a fourth alternative. You could confess.”

  Dolly’s entire programmed purpose was reading the emotional state and unspoken intentions of people. Her lips curved in understanding. “What happens if I confess?”

  Roz’s heart beat faster. “Do you wish to?”

  “Will it benefit me?”

  “It might,” Roz said. “Detective King has been in touch with the DA, and she likes a good media event as much as the next guy. Make no mistake, this will be that.”

  “I understand.”

  “The situation you were placed in by Mr. Steele could be a basis for a lenience. You would not have to face a jury trial, and a judge might be convinced to treat you as … well, as a person. Also, a confession might be seen as evidence of contrition. Possession is oversold, you know. It’s precedent that’s nine tenths of the law. There are, of course, risks—”

  “I would like to request a lawyer,” Dolly said.

  Roz took a breath that might change the world. “We’ll proceed as if that were your legal right, then.”

  * * *

  Roz’s house let her in with her key, and the smell of roasted sausage and baking potatoes wafted past.

  “Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.

  His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”

  She left her shoes in the hall and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room, as different from Steele’s white wasteland as anything bounded by four walls could be. Her feet did not sink deeply into this carpet, but skipped along atop it like stones.

  It was clean, though, and that was Sven’s doing. And she was not coming home to an empty house, and that was his doing too.

  He was cooking shirtless. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”

  “Nobody died,” she said. “Yet.”

  He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that nobody has died yet?”

  “Hopeful,” she said.

  “It’s good that you’re hopeful,” he said. “Would you like your dinner?”

  “Do you like music, Sven?”

  “I could put on some music, if you like. What do you want to hear?”

  “Anything.” It would be something off her favorites playlist, chosen by random numbers. As it swelled in the background, Sven picked up the spoon. “Sven?”

  “Yes, Rosamund?”

  “Put the spoon down, please, and come and dance with me?”

  “I do not know how to dance.”

  “I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.”

  “Whatever you want,” he said.

  Martian Heart

  JOHN BARNES

  John Barnes is one of the most prolific and popular of all the writers who entered SF in the 1980s. His many books include the novels A Million Open Doors, The Mother of Storms, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In the Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky, The Armies of Memory, Tales of the Madman Underground, Directive 51, and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin, The Return and Encounter with Tiber. His short work has been collected in … And Orion and Apostrophes and Apocalypses. His most recent books are the novels
Daybreak Zero and Losers in Space, and the forthcoming audiobook The Last President. Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

  Here he weaves an affecting story of a love that’s both young—and doomed.

  Okay, botterogator, I agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to inspire a new generation of Martians. It is so weird that there is a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.

  Do I want to be consistent with previous public statements?

  Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.

  Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either tentatively or consistent even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.

  So weird. She was.

  We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family—they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re-edj.

  So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.

  They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well-known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”

  “Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”