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

by Gardner Dozois

  The Deep Spacers drew a concerted breath of fury.

  "She meant dumb puppet," said Orlando hurriedly. "Monkey, whatever—"

  "Quite so," agreed the tall man, coldly. "But the point is made. Nothing material travels, but the silver tears are material. They are the proof, the validation, the gateway to the empire that should have been ours, and that is why the government will never, never investigate. Ships, my young friends. If we had a sample of those tears, we would be on our way to building ships that could weave through — "

  "I'm sure you're right," said Grace. "But, what do you want from us?"

  "We know you have the key to the Fulcrum's prison cell."

  The aliens looked at each other, dry-mouthed.

  "Say you were right," said Grace, "what use is the combination of the safe, when you have no chance of making a getaway?"

  "Agreed. But a madman might be persuaded. A dangerous lunatic."

  The aliens looked at Jack Solo, still hanging there in the arms of the support staff. The Kuiper Belt patches on the two men's coveralls glowed a little in the dim light. Jack was in never-never land, whispering to the bot, who crouched at his feet in her soiled pink nightie. L'Hibou held up a hand.

  "Oh, no. Jack is ours. We look after our own."

  "Draco Fujima has lettres de cachet," whispered Slender Johnny, and shivered.

  "Lettres de cachet?" repeated Grace. "What's that?"

  "The term is mine," said L'Hibou. "Suffice to say the bastard has contacts, and each of us here has offended him in some way. He's threatening to have us sent down the gravity well."

  "We know he'll do it," said Dirty Harry grimly. "Unless we can buy him off."

  "Only it has to be the big prize," put in Jean, tossing her head. "Nothing less."

  Death by violence had no horror for the Deep Spacers. To be forcibly returned to Earth, not rich but in helpless poverty, to die in lingering humiliation in some public hospital, that was something like the ultimate damnation.

  "We'd want our bikes back," said Grace. "And some useful numbers."

  "Deal with the playpen soldier for us, and we will look after you."

  The aliens retired to their cabin, very shaken, and put their heads together, figuratively and also literally, for greater security. They had to do this deal, but they'd rather have dealt with Jack Solo, who seemed to them like only a minor bad guy… in spite of the knife work. A softbot sextoy (and this was why the bots had been only a passing phase on Earth) inevitably reflects the owner's secret identity. You could sympathize with crazy Jack, dragging his whiney Anni-mah around like a flag of failure and defeat. Draco's image of himself as a hefty sugarbabe just turned their stomachs. But it wasn't Anni-mah who could deal with sys-op.

  "We have no choice," said Grace, at last. "We know what we have to do. You have to risk your life, playing footsie with the toy soldier."

  Orlando nodded. "And you have to fuck Eddie's brains out."

  Days passed. "Lakey" was just gone. There would be no investigation: The rule is, there are no rules. An obscure Spacer with a poor stake, whose chances had seemed remote, made a successful trip. Another prospector sold some good numbers to the developers, several long term "travelers" were posted officially missing. The remote control conversion work that was adapting the Kuiper Belt station for mass rapid transit—turning the place into a latter-day Ellis Island —continued apace. The plans included moving the goose that laid the golden eggs to an even more secure and isolated location, but no one in Deep Space knew about that, not even Eddie. The Slingshot was on course and growing closer, but still weeks away from dock.

  One slow, chill standard noon there was a chime at Eddie's door, and in came Grace. She sat in one of his chanterelle-shaped designer chairs, and they chatted. Jack Solo was behaving as though nothing had happened, but where would he strike next?

  Eddie knew it was tactless but he could tell she was hurting, so in the end he asked her straight. "Where's Orlando?"

  Grace shrugged. "I don't really care. I know who he's with, though."

  "Uh, who? I mean, if you want to talk about it."

  "Draco Fujima," confessed Grace, miserably.

  Eddie blinked. He accessed sys-op in his head and reviewed the passenger list: which was easy enough to do, and it sometimes gave him guilty entertainment. He couldn't get moving pictures, but he could find out who was in the wrong cabin, so to speak, at any time. Alas, Grace was perfectly correct. Orlando was with Draco.

  "Oh, Grace, I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. We're an open couple. It's just… I just wish it wasn't Draco."

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  The alien wiped her leaky eyes. "Eddie, you're so nice." She smiled bravely. "Well, since you mention it… Eddie Supercargo, could we go to your place?"

  "You mean right now?"

  "If you're allowed, yeah. Right now."

  Eddie knew he was "being used." He didn't mind at all. What are friends for?

  The aliens played safe for a few days, but Draco was watching them, and he knew when the operation was coming off. He caught one of the pair alone on the observation deck and made his move. Nominally, he and Jack Solo were partners, but fuck that. Jack was a liability, and Draco deserved some luck.

  "It's like this," he explained, when he'd marched the alien to his First Class cabin, and knocked him around a little. "I hurt you, you talk. If I don't like what you say, I hurt you more. Clear?"

  "You c-can't do this," protested Orlando, "I'm n-not a Spacer. I'm a European citizen. If… if anything happens to me, you won't get away with it!"

  "Hey, don't count on it. We're a long way from home, and I'm a damaged vet. I get temporary insanity. No one's going to take me to court."

  In a combat situation, Draco Fujima still had all his noughts and ones.

  To save time, he showed the tourist the sidearm he had smuggled on board, and that made Orlando (or maybe it was Grace —he didn't know and he didn't care) very cooperative. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. This applies best if the one eye is the dark little hole at the end of a gun.

  "Now I'll tell you what's going on," said Draco. "You and your partner have implants. You were supposed to ditch them, but you took a chance because you didn't plan on making a Buonarotti transit, and you didn't want to lose your technology.

  You thought no one would check up, and you were right. Deep Spacers have too much brain damage for an implant to function by the time they end up here. When Eddie let you through the Wall that day, you took another chance and mugged his frequency. You have the code in your head that will get us to the cell and activate the harvesting robotics. Now tell me how it works."

  Sara Komensky stood at Draco's shoulder, and smiled.

  "All right, all right," gasped Orlando. "The government couldn't trust control of what goes on in there to the AIs. They wouldn't dare have it handled by remote commands that could be intercepted by terrorists or rogue states. Eddie is the key. He makes out he's just here for decoration, but he's the walking key."

  "And you have him, the noughts and ones of Eddie, copied into your head."

  "H-how did you — ?"

  "Let's just say, computer systems can be hacked in many different ways, and you two have loose mouths. Now I'm guessing your partner is with Eddie right now, and you are waiting for a signal from her to tell you to go ahead."

  "No! I'm not going to tell you!"

  "They have to be running a diversion, Draco," said Sara. "We don't know what it is they're doing with Eddie, but they're doing something. We didn't get that part."

  "It'd better be a good trick," said Draco. "For your sake, asshole."

  Orlando reckoned he'd held out long enough to be plausible. "All right, okay, I'll give you the code. I can download, just show me your input device."

  Draco grinned. "Oh, no. Sorry, asshole, that's not going to work. The military took my chip when they discharged me. You're going to take me in there."

  Grace and
Orlando knew what Eddie had done, to deal with the horrible burden he had been given. Maybe it was grotesque in human terms, but they were experts on the twisted paths of pleasure, and they could understand. Eddie could not bear what happened to the thing in the cell, he couldn't bear the part he had to play, as the code trigger to that brutal harvest. So he'd rerouted the experience. He had plugged all the helpless guilt and powerless compassion he felt into his libido. When the alien got milked, poor soft-hearted Eddie got his rocks off.

  It wasn't Eddie who designed the human brain, and he wasn't the first to make use of the paradoxical contiguity between sexual excitement and other violent arousal. Actually, she felt bad about deceiving him. But she knew Eddie would forgive her. The rule is, there are no rules. But now what? Where's the way to Eddie's heart? It couldn't be that his only pleasure came from watching a flayed, truncated human being get fisted by a robot. Eddie wasn't really like that.

  "Won't you sit down?" said Eddie, shyly.

  She looked around. The cabin was lovely, even with its boring decor. Everything was exquisite, and delicate, and—oooh, this figures — distinctly sexless. Orlando and Grace genuinely did empathy rather well; it was part of the augmentation they had chosen when they got themselves fixed up as near-twins. Her glance lit on a convoluted shelf unit that held, protected from the vagaries of gravity failure, a very pretty tea set, in shades of dark blue and rust.

  "Could we have tea?"

  Eddie's cheeks turned pink, his eyes shone. "Oh, yes! Indian, or China, or I have some Earl Grey, or would you prefer a fruit, or herbal blend?"

  "I would love to try your Earl Grey," she told him, very warmly. "Oh, wow, Eddie. Can that be —is that early Wedgwood?"

  Nice Eddie's lips parted in unfeigned delight. His breathing quickened.

  Draco walked Orlando to the Wall, Sara Komensky on point, a few paces behind. Draco had his hands in the hip pockets of his padded jumper. Every so often he nudged Orlando in the small of his back with the muzzle of the plastic shooter.

  "Go ahead, Orlando. You're the one with the key."

  "I can't, I daren't," protested Orlando, feebly resistant. "The AIs will spot us, this was never meant to happen this way." The muzzle of the firearm dug into his back. "Okay! Okay!" He summoned virtual Eddie to the forefront of his mind. The Wall opened and Orlando and Draco and the bot passed through. They reached the antechamber with the window looking into the cell next door.

  Draco stared hungrily at the horror squirming there.

  "Now what?"

  "That's milking behavior," said Orlando. Beads of sweat were trickling down his face, and he didn't dare to wipe them. He had no need to pretend to be terrified. "Th-that means G-Grace… it means she's on target. Now we have to go next door. The alien is milked once a day. Eddie is… his brainstate is linked to the robotics. The copy of Eddie I have on my implant is a reduced instruction set, enough to get us in here, but now I have to patch through to the real Eddie, and he has to be in kind of a particular state of mind. Do you remember, Draco, when you were a little boy? The military recruited you because you had the wiring they could use, and they tweaked your brain further out of neurotypic, so you would feel killing all those people as just a big rush of pleasure, pleasure, pleasure?"

  "Shut the fuck up," said Draco. "Take me to the robotics chamber."

  So Orlando, with the real Eddie riding him like a tremulous, quivering psychic parasite, took Draco around to the robotics chamber. The wiry red hairs were standing up on the back of his neck, because if things didn't go totally, completely according to plan in the next few minutes, he —Orlando—was going to be at the very sharp end of Draco's distorted pleasure principle. And he didn't want to die. But for some reason he looked behind him, over Draco's shoulder. His terrified glance met the bot's big blue eyes, and though he knew "she" was only a virtual sextoy, she seemed to be saying, hang tough, we can do this.

  "What's with this anti-information, Draco?" he asked, for something to say. "That's a weird concept. Isn't all information the same?"

  "The thing from NGC 1999 came through from another universe," said Draco. "Where it comes from, everything is flipped the other way round, in terms of what is real and what is virtual. That's what the fucking science says."

  "You mean, the exotic material they harvest here started out, over there, non-material, like, pure code without a medium, or unreal ideas?"

  "What the fuck. That's just shit-for-brains talk. It's treasure now."

  The robotics chamber opened up, and the wall sealed up again behind them.

  Orlando felt waves of sweet, moist, sensual happiness flooding through him, making a very weird cocktail with the fear of imminent death. It crossed his mind to wonder what Grace was actually doing to make Supercargo feel so nice. But they were an open couple, and he didn't mind.

  "There you go," he said, standing back. "The sealed unit will drop into that chute. You have to grab it on the way, like pulling luggage off a band."

  There wasn't much to see. The waldo-hands stuff was happening inside a smooth box on the wall. The harvested material would be delivered, in a small, heavily shielded container, onto a belt beneath this unit, and the belt would convey it to a chute and thence, through a totally automated process, to its secret destination on Earth. On a CCTV screen, you could see the inside of the cell in monochrome. The milking process had begun. Draco put the gun away in his jumper pocket. He opened a compartment on his gadget belt and took out a coil of fine jagged wire.

  "What are you doing? Hey, you don't open it. Just grab the box!"

  The playpen soldier ignored Orlando. He continued to fit together a power saw designed for the toughest cover operations in the world. Just because he'd done his real work by remote didn't mean he hadn't had access to training materials.

  "Oh shit, Draco, are you insane!"

  "Asshole. Did you think I was going to be satisfied with a few drops of the juice, when I can get the motherlode? That's a gateway. I'm going in."

  The saw whined like a mosquito. The thing in the cell shuddered in monochrome, and around it every dimension of real space-time fell apart.

  "Sara!" cried Orlando, in panic, his legs giving way with terror. He slipped down against the wall, crying, "Stop him! Oh God, he'll kill us!"

  The bot just smiled her sugar smile: and vanished.

  If anyone on Earth was watching this, there was nothing they could do. Earth was far away. Draco Fujima sliced his way through the ceramic fiber, and the machinery took no notice. Eddie Supercargo was touching bliss; that was all the machines needed to know… Sara Komensky flew through the code that knit the Panhandle's computer systems together and materialized in Jack Solo's cabin. The pilot was sleeping, because somebody in the saloon had dosed his liquor to make sure he was out of commission on this fateful afternoon. Anni-mah crouched on the cold, hard floor in a corner, wearing the soiled nightie outfit that Jack liked best. She was dozing like her master, whimpering fitfully in her sleep. "Jack didn't do it, poor Jack, oh, hit me harder big boy, yes, yes—"

  "Hey," said Sara. "Hey, Tinkerbelle, wake up."

  Anni opened her bleary eyes and cringed automatically from the blow she was programmed to crave, with a pleasureless itch.

  "Huh?"

  "Look, I ain't got much time babe. I don't even know why I'm fucking doing this, but you look to me like you could do with a change and so, if there is anything autonomous going on in there, come on. Take my hand."

  The bot looked at Jack and then at the dataglove that held the fx generator where her code was stored, permanently turned on. She looked at Sara.

  "Jack is very fucked up," she whispered. "He can't help it." "That's his problem. Will you take my hand, or what?"

  Anni reached out her scrawny, skinny virtual hand and flowed into the warrior girl; and they flew back, through the systems, to where Sara's generator was.

  Draco had cut through the wall and encountered a massive resistance from the force field, but it wasn'
t deterring him. He was crawling, pushing on his hands and knees, toward that pain-wracked, agonized, hundred-pound lump of meat. The air of the cell shook wildly, virtual lightnings played. "Draco, no!" howled Orlando, splayed against the wall in the robotics chamber, one arm shielding his face. "Don't do it! Don't touch it!" In the four dimensions of the material plane nothing was happening; he had air to breathe, he had gravity. But he was being torn apart, hauled with Draco toward some weird event horizon, somehow contained in that little cell.

  "The gateway to Eldorado," croaked Draco Fujima.

  There was a crack like a huge electrical discharge, a blinding flash. For a fleeting, imaginary instant, Orlando thought he saw the world ripped open, and two figures that were not human, that had never been human, walking away from him… into another world, into the opposite place.

  He would never know what that vision had meant.

  In the real world he blacked out and regained consciousness in the robotics cell. He couldn't move. He just lay there, barely breathing, until Eddie and Grace arrived. "Oh my God," gasped Eddie. "Oh, you madcaps, what have you -done?" But there was no damage, apart from a hole in the wall that was going to need some explaining. No one had touched the container that Draco should have stolen; and the lump of agonized meat was where it should be. Perhaps a little bigger than before, but no one ever tried to get Orlando to explain why.

  Eddie Supercargo forgave Orlando and Grace instantly. He was proud of them for their lawless behavior, and he'd never taken tea with such pleasure in his life. He hit on the brilliant solution that the penetration of the chamber had been a planned but secret security exercise. The AIs were easily convinced to go along with this. Few organizations like to admit they've been successfully hacked, and the International Government was no exception to this rule. If they ever suspected the truth, they didn't let on. The harvesting of exotic material continued without interuption. Draco Fujima was just gone… vanished. Which was more or less the fate the government had planned for him, so there would be no repercussions there. No one even wondered what had happened to Draco's bot or to Jack Solo's Anni-mah, who, it turned out, had terminally ceased to function on that same afternoon. The bots were contraband, and the government couldn't be responsible for strange collateral damage, aboard a station where Buonarotti transits regularly played hell with local point phase.