The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Aileen's voice breaks. She storms out of the room the same instant Malcolm starts crying. Without thinking, I go after her.

  "I was just asking…" I hear Craig saying as I slam the door shut behind me.

  I find her in the back garden, sitting on the ground next to the angel, one hand wrapped around its leg, and I feel a surge of jealousy.

  "Hi," I say. "Mind if I sit down?"

  "Go ahead, it's a free patch of grass." She smiles wanly. "I spooked everybody pretty badly back there, didn't I?"

  "I think you did. Malcolm is still crying."

  "It's just… I don't know. It all came out. And then I thought that it doesn't matter if he hears it too, that he plays all these games with much worse stuff going on all the time, that it wouldn't matter. I'm so stupid."

  "I think it's the fact that it was you telling it," I say slowly. "That makes it true."

  She sighs. "You're right. I'm such an arse. I shouldn't have let Craig get me going like that, but we had a rough time up north, and to hear him making light of it like that—"

  "It's okay."

  "Hey," she says. "I've missed you. You make things make sense."

  "I'm glad somebody thinks so."

  "Come on," Aileen says, wiping her face. "Let's go for a walk, or better yet, let's go to the pub. I'm still hungry. And I could use a drink. My first leave and I'm still sober. Sergeant Katsuki would disown me if she knew."

  "We'll have to see what we can do about that," I say and we start walking toward the harbor.

  I don't know if a girl like Aileen would ever have taken an interest in a guy like me if it hadn't been for the fact that I used to be a god.

  Two years ago. University cafeteria. Me, trying to get used to the pale colors of the real world again. Alone. And then three girls sit down in the neighboring table. Pretty. Loud.

  "Seriously," says the one with a pastel-colored jacket and a Hello-Kitty-shaped Fish-interface, "I want to do it with a post. Check this out." The girls huddle around her fogscreen. "There's a cast called Postcoital. Sex with gods. This girl is like their groupie. Follows them around. I mean, just the cool ones that don't go unstable."

  There's a moment of reverent silence.

  "Wow!" says the second girl. "I always thought that was an urban legend. Or some sort of staged porn thing."

  "Apparently not," says the third.

  These days, the nerd rapture is like the 'flu: you can catch it. The godplague is a volition-bonding, recursively self-improving and self-replicating program. A genie that comes to you and makes its home in the machinery around you and tells you that do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. It fucks you up, but it's sexy as hell.

  "Seriously," says the first girl, "no wonder the guys who wrote Fish were all guys. The whole thing is just another penis. It has no regard for female sexuality. I mean, there's no feminist angle at all in the whole collective volition thing. Seriously."

  "My God!" says the second girl. "That one there. I want to do him, uh, her. It… All of them. I really do."

  "No you don't," I say.

  "Excuse me?" She looks at me as if she's just stepped in something unpleasant and wants to wipe it off. "We're having a private conversation here."

  "Sure. I just wanted to say that that cast is a fake. And I really wouldn't mess around with the posts if I were you."

  "You speak from experience? Got your dick bitten off by a post girl?" For once I'm grateful I need the symbiote: if I ignore its whispers, her face is just a blank mask to me.

  There is nervous laughter from the other girls.

  "Yes," I say. "I used to be one."

  They get up in unison, stare at me for a second and walk away. Masks, I think. Masks.

  A moment later I'm interrupted again.

  "I'm sorry," the third girl says. "I mean, really, really sorry. They're not really my friends, we're just doing the same course. I'm Aileen."

  "That's OK," I say. "I don't really mind."

  Aileen sits on the corner of the table, and I don't really mind that either.

  "What was it like?" she asks. Her eyes are very green. Inquisitive, says the symbiote. And I realize that I desperately want it to say something else.

  "You really want to know?" I ask.

  "Yes," she says.

  I look at my hands.

  "I was a quacker," I say slowly, "a quantum hacker. And when the Fish-source came out, I tinkered with it, just like pretty much every geek on the planet. And I got mine to compile: my own friendly AI slave, an idiot-proof supergoal system, just designed to turn me from a sack of flesh into a Jack Kirby New God, not to harm anybody else. Or so it told me."

  I grimace. "My external nervous system took over the Helsinki University of Technology's supercomputing cluster in about thirty seconds. It got pretty ugly after that."

  "But you made it," says Aileen, eyes wide.

  "Well, back then, the Fish still had the leisure to be gentle. The starfish were there before anybody was irretrievably dead. It burned my AI off like an information cancer and shoved me back into—" I make a show of looking at myself. "Well, this, I guess."

  "Wow!" Aileen says, slender fingers wrapped around a cup of latte.

  "Yeah," I say. "That's pretty much what I said."

  "And how do you feel now? Did it hurt? Do you miss it?"

  I laugh.

  "I don't really remember most of it. The Fish amputated a lot of memories. And there was some damage as well." I swallow.

  "I'm… It's a mild form of Asperger's, more or less. I don't read people very well anymore." I take off my beanie. "This is pretty ugly." I show her the symbiote at the back of my head. Like most Fish-machines, it looks like a starfish. "It's a symbiote. It reads people for me."

  She touches it gently and I feel it. The symbiote can map tactile information with much higher resolution than my skin and I can feel the complex contours of Aileen's fingertips gliding on its surface.

  "I think it's really pretty," she says. "Like a jewel. Hey, it's warm! What else does it do? Is it like, a Fish-interface? In your head?"

  "No. It combs my brain all the time. It makes sure that the thing I was is not hiding in there." I laugh. "It's a shitty thing to be, a washed-up god."

  Aileen smiles. It's a very pretty smile, says the symbiote. I don't know if it's biased because it's being caressed.

  "You have to admit that sounds pretty cool," she says. "Or do you just tell that to all the girls?"

  That night she takes me home.

  We have fish and chips in the Smuggler's Den. Aileen and I are the only customers; the publican is an old man who greets her by name. The food is fabbed and I find it too greasy, but Aileen eats with apparent relish and washes it down with a pint of beer.

  "At least you've still got your appetite," I say.

  "Training in the Gobi Desert teaches you to miss food," she says and my heart jumps at the way she brushes her hair back. "My skin cells can do photosynthesis. Stuff you don't get from the fancasts. It's terrible. You always feel hungry, but they don't let you eat. Makes you incredibly alert, though. My pee will be a weird color for the whole weekend because all these nanites will be coming out."

  "Thanks for sharing that."

  "Sorry. Soldier talk."

  "You do feel different," I say.

  "You don't," she says.

  "Well, I am." I take a sip from my pint, hoping the sym-biote will let me get drunk. "I am different."

  She sighs.

  "Thanks for coming. It's good to see you."

  "It's okay."

  "No, really, it does mean a lot to me, I—"

  "Aileen, please." I lock the symbiote. I tell myself I don't know what she's thinking. Honest. "You don't have to." I empty my pint. "There's something I've been wondering, actually. I've thought about this a lot. I've had a lot of time. What I mean is—" The words stick in my mouth.

  "Go on," says Aileen.

  "There's no reason why you have to do this, go out
there and fight monsters, unless—"

  I flinch at the thought, even now.

  "Unless you were so angry with me that you had to go kill things, things like I used to be."

  Aileen gets up.

  "No, that wasn't it," she says. "That wasn't it at all!"

  "I hear you. You don't have to shout."

  She squeezes her eyes shut. "Turn on your damn symbiote and come with me."

  "Where are we going?"

  "To the beach, to skip stones."

  "Why?" I ask.

  "Because I feel like it."

  We go down to the beach. It's sunny like it hasn't been for a few months. The huge Fish that floats near the horizon, a diamond starfish almost a mile in diameter, may have something to do with that.

  We walk along the line drawn by the surf. Aileen runs ahead, taunting the waves.

  There is a nice spot with lots of round, flat stones between two piers. Aileen picks up a few, swings her arm and makes an expert throw, sending one skimming and bouncing across the waves.

  "Come on. You try."

  I try. The stone flies in a high arc, plummets down and disappears into the water. It doesn't even make a splash.

  I laugh, and look at her. Aileen's face is lit by the glow of the starfish in the distance mingled with sunlight. For a moment, she looks just like the girl who brought me here to spend Christmas with her parents.

  Then Aileen is crying.

  "I'm sorry," she says. "I was going to tell you before I came. But I couldn't."

  She clings to me. Waves lap at our feet.

  "Aileen, please tell me what's wrong. You know I can't always tell."

  She sits down on the wet sand.

  "Remember what I told Craig? About the babies."

  "Yeah."

  Aileen swallows.

  "Before I left you," she says, "I had a baby."

  At first I think it's just sympathy sex. I don't mind that: I've had that more than a few times, both before and after my brief stint as the Godhead. But Aileen stays. She makes breakfast. She walks to the campus with me in the morning, holding my hand, and laughs at the spamvores chasing ad icons on the street, swirling like multicolored leaves in the wind. I grow her a Fish-interface from my symbiote as a birthday present: it looks like a ladybird. She calls it Mr. Bug.

  I'm easy: that's all it takes for me to fall in love.

  That winter in Prezzagard passes quickly. We find a flat together in the Stack vertical village, and I pay for it with some scripting hackwork.

  And then, one morning, her bed is empty and Mr. Bug sits on her pillow. Her toiletry things are gone from the bathroom. I call her friends, send bots to local sousveillance peernets. No one has seen her. I spend two nights inventing nightmares. Does she have a lover? Did I do something wrong? The symbiote is not infallible, and there are times when I dread saying the wrong thing, just by accident.

  She comes back on the morning of the third day. I open the door and there she is, looking pale and dishevelled.

  "Where have you been?" I ask. She looks so lost that I want to hold her, but she pushes me away.

  Hate, says the symbiote. Hate.

  "Sorry," she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I just came to get my things. I have to go."

  I try to say something, that I don't understand, that we can work this out, that nothing's so bad she can't tell me about it, and if it's my fault, I'll fix it. I want to plead. I want to beg. But the hate is a fiery aura around her that silences me and I watch quietly as the Fish-drones carry her life away.

  "Don't ask me to explain," she says at the door. "Look after Mr. Bug."

  After she's gone, I want to tear the symbiote out of my skull. I want the black worm that is hiding in my mind to come out and take over again, make me a god who is above pain and love and hate, a god who can fly. Things go hazy for a while. I think I try to open the window and make a three-hundred-meter dive, but the Fish in the walls and the glass won't let me: this is a cruel world we've made, a lovingly cruel world that won't let us hurt ourselves.

  At some point, the symbiote puts me to sleep. It does it again when I wake up, after I start breaking things. And again, until some sort of Pavlovian reflex kicks in.

  Later, I spend long nights trawling through the images in Mr. Bug's lifecache: I try to figure it out by using the symbiote to pattern-match emotions from the slices of our life together. But there's nothing that hasn't been resolved, nothing that would linger and fester. Unless I'm getting it all wrong.

  It's something that's happened before, I tell myself. / touch the sky and fall. Nothing new.

  And so I sleep-walk. Graduate. Work. Write Fish-scripts. Forget. Tell myself I'm over it.

  Then Aileen calls and I get the first train north.

  I listen to the sound of her heartbeat, trying to understand her words. They tumble through my mind, too heavy for me to grasp.

  "Aileen. Jesus, Aileen."

  The god hiding in my mind, in the dead parts, in my cells, in my DNA—

  Suddenly, I want to throw up.

  "I didn't know what was happening, at first," says Aileen, her voice flat and colorless. "I felt strange. I just wanted to be alone, somewhere high and far away. So I went to one of the empty flats up at the Stacktop—one of the freshly grown ones—to spend the night and think. Then I got really hungry. I mean, really, really hungry. So I ate fabbed food, lots and lots. And then my belly started growing."

  With the Fish around, contraception is the default state of things unless one actually wants a baby. But there had been that night in Pittenweem, just after Christmas, beyond the Wall where the Fish-spores that fill the air in Prezzagard are few. And I could just see it happening, the godseed in my brain hacking my cells, making tiny molecular machines much smaller than sperm, carrying DNA laden with code, burrowing into Aileen.

  "It didn't feel strange. There was no pain. I lay down, my waters broke and it just pulled itself out. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," she says, smiling. "It had your eyes and these tiny, tiny fingers. Each had the most perfect fingernail. It looked at me and smiled."

  "It waved at me. Like… like it decided that it didn't need me anymore. And then the walls just opened and it flew away. My baby. Flew away."

  The identification mechanism I used to slave the godseed was just my DNA. It really didn't occur to me that there was a loophole there. It could make my volition its own. Reinvent itself. And once it did that, it could modify itself as much as it pleased. Grow wings, if it wanted.

  I hold Aileen. We're both wet and shivering, but I don't care.

  "I'm sorry. That night I came to tell you," she says. "And then I saw it looking at me again. From your eyes. I had to go away."

  "So you joined the Corps."

  She sighs.

  "Yes. It helped. Doing something, being needed."

  "I needed you too," I say.

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  Anger wells up in my throat. "So is it working? Are you guys defeating the superbabies and the dark lords? Does it make you happy?"

  She flinches away from me. "You sound like Craig now."

  "Well, what am I supposed to say? I'm sorry about the baby. But it wasn't your fault. Or mine."

  "It was you who—" She lifts her hand to her mouth. "Sorry, I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that."

  "Go back to your penance and leave me alone."

  I start running along the waterline, heading nowhere in particular.

  The angel is waiting for me on the shore.

  "Hello, Jukka," it says. "Good to see you again."

  As always, the voice is androgynous and pleasant. It tickles something in my brain. It is the voice of the Fish.

  "Hi."

  "Can I help you7"

  "Not really. Unless you want to give her up. Make her see sense."

  "I can't interfere with her decisions," says the angel. "That's not what I do. I only give you—and her—what you want, or what you would want if you wer
e smarter. That's my supergoal. You know that."

  "You self-righteous bastard. The collective volition of humanity is that she must go and fight monsters? And probably die in the process? Is it supposed to be character-forming or something?"

  The angel says nothing, but it's got me going now.

  "And I can't even be sure that it's Aileen's own decision. This—this thing in my head—it's you. You could have let the godseed escape, just to hurt Aileen enough to get her to sign up to your bloody kamikaze squadron. And the chances are that you knew that I was going to come here and rant at you and there's nothing I can do to stop her. Or is there?"

  The angel considers this.

  "If I could do that, the world would be perfect already." It cocks its glass head to one side. "But perhaps there is someone who wanted you to be here."

  "Don't try to play head games with me!"

  Anger rushes out of me like a river. I pound the angel's chest with my fists. Its skin flows away like a soap bubble.

  "Jukka!"

  The voice comes from somewhere far away.

  "Jukka, stop," says Aileen. "Stop, you idiot!"

  She yanks me around with irresistible strength. "Look at me! It wasn't the Fish. It wasn't you. It wasn't the baby. It was me. I want to do this. Why won't you let me?"

  I look at her, my eyes brimming.

  "Because I can't come with you."

  "You silly boy," she says, and now it's her holding me as I cry, for the first time since I stopped being a god. "Silly, silly boy."

  After a while, I run out of tears. We sit on a rock, watching the sun set. I feel light and empty.

  "Maybe it would have been easier if you hadn't called," I say, sighing.

  Aileen's eyes widen.

  "What do you mean? I never did. I thought Craig did. It would have been just like him. To keep me from going back."

  And then we see the baby.

  It is bald and naked and pink, and a hair-thin silver umbilical hangs from its navel. Its eyes are green like Aileen's, but their gaze is mine. It floats in the air, its perfect tiny toes almost touching the water.