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

by Gardner Dozois

  Jack was inconsolable, but perhaps he was better off that way.

  Orlando and Grace got their bikes back, and some useful numbers, which they sold through sys-op for a reasonable return on their investment. They spent most of the rest of their stay in their cabin, watching movies, setting themselves mountain race targets and trying to keep from bouncing off the walls. They didn't visit the saloon much, and they never went near the transit lounge. Shortly before they left on the Slingshot, they made a last excursion to the observation deck.

  And there are the stars of Orion. Red Betelgeuse, brilliant blue Rigel, Bellatrix and Saiph; Mintaka, Alnilam and Alniak in the hunter's belt. At this exposure the jewel in the sword was not prominent, and it took a practiced eye to make out V380 Orionis… and the reflection nebula where you could find the birth-material called a Bok Globule, "a jet black cloud resembling a T lying on its side," that allegedly held stars so young they were barely the age of homo sapiens.

  "We won't be that much further away from them," said Orlando.

  They heard limping steps behind them, and L'Hibou joined them at the guard rail. "Not in entire nakedness," he said. "But trailing clouds of glory do we come. If stars are born, my young friends, do they have a life before birth, and after death?"

  "I'm sorry it didn't work out," said Orlando. "I suppose you won't get your lightships. But I didn't know he would do that."

  Grace shook her head. "I can't figure it," she said. "Light years, gravity equations, time and probability, non-location science… I can't think on that scale. I turn it into fantasies, the moment I start."

  "All of science can do no more. And here in deep space, we just live out the same soap operas as you in the world below."

  "Maybe it's for the best," suggested Orlando. "Maybe it's better if the gate stays closed, and the empires are contained on separate planets, in the old style."

  "Tuh. It won't last. The lightships will come —Hm." The visor that hid L'Hibou's ruined eyes was fixed on the view; but they knew he was working up to one of those confessions that can only be made on the brink of a departure.

  "When your partner gets killed," he remarked at last, "you're supposed to do something. Lana and I were together for a long time. In some ways I didn't like her much, but she was still my partner. Solo wasn't the murderer, not in my opinion. It was Draco who told Jack you were meeting Lana in the maintenance bay that night and that she was going to get you your bikes back. Draco knew that would make poor Jack crazy—Jack hated those damned bikes. And I knew Draco would try to go through the gate if he got the chance. I wanted the murderer to suffer. Well, that's all."

  The Deep Spacer turned, and limped back into the drab corridors.

  Orlando and Grace spared a shudder for the fate of Draco Fujima. But if the rule is that there are no rules, then Drac had nothing to complain about.

  "One day," said Orlando, "we'll make the transition nobody can avoid."

  "Yeah. And then maybe we'll walk where the stars are born."

  And who can tell?

  * * *

  Mayfly

  Peter Watts & Derryl Murphy

  From Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)

  So here's one of my (very rare) collaborations, with Derryl Murphy. We must have done something right, because it's being reprinted in Dozois's Year's Best antho and is an alleged Aurora finalist to boot. Personally, I'm not sure what all the shouting's about; it's not that good (not that the Auroras are any kind of infallible index of literary merit, mind you). I mean, geez: it's about a cute kid...

  * * *

  "I hate you."

  A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.

  "I hate you."

  Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.

  "I hate you I hate you I HATE you!"

  The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.

  At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.

  She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.

  "Jeannie, hush...." Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.

  Stavros frowned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man.

  And then: They don't deserve her.

  The screaming child didn't turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a better view: Jeannie's face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.

  "Make it clear," she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.

  Kim Goravec shook her head. "Honey, we'd love to show you outside. Remember before, how much you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn't used to, honey, you—"

  "Now!" Back to rage, the pure, white-hot anger of a small child.

  The pads on the wall panel were greasy from Jeannie's repeated, sticky-fingered attempts to use them herself. Andrew flashed a begging look at his wife: Please, let's just give her what she wants.

  His wife was stronger. "Jeannie, we know it's difficult —"

  Jeannie turned to face the enemy. The north pickup got it all: the right hand rising to the mouth, the index finger going in. The defiant glare in those glistening, focused eyes.

  Kim took a step forward. "Jean, honey, no!"

  They were baby teeth, still, but sharp. They'd bitten to the bone before Mommy even got within touching distance. A red stain blossomed from Jeannie's mouth, flowed down her chin like some perverted re-enactment of mealtime messes as a baby, and covered the lower half of her face in an instant. Above the gore, bright angry eyes said gotcha.

  Without a sound Jeannie Goravec collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head as she pitched forward. Kim caught her just before her head hit the floor. "Oh God, Andy, she's fainted, she's in shock, she—"

  Andrew didn't move. One hand was buried in the pocket of his blazer, fiddling with something.

  Stavros felt his mouth twitch. Is that a remote control in your pocket or are you just glad to—

  Kim had the tube of liquid skin out, sprayed it onto Jeannie's hand while cradling the child's head in her lap. The bleeding slowed. After a moment Kim looked back at her husband, who was standing motionless and unhelpful against the wall. He had that look on his face, that giveaway look that Stavros was seeing so often these days.

  "You turned her off," Kim said, her voice rising. "After everything we'd agreed on, you still turned her off?!"

  Andrew shrugged helplessly. "Kim…"

  Kim refused to look at him. She rocked back and forth, tuneless breath whistling between her teeth, Jeannie's head still in her lap. Kim and Andrew Goravec with their bundle of joy. Between them, the cable connecting Jeannie's head to the server shivered on the floor like a disputed boundary.

  *

  Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth — finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air.

  Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there'd been others in on the miracle — a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawy
ers — but they'd all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained — and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a ‘project'. She was his as much as the Goravecs'. Maybe more.

  But even Stavros still didn't know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.

  It hadn't started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they'd been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros' mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off.

  A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers — your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.

  So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?

  We're the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we're blind.

  He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex, translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren't sight, they're just… raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds, pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on. More than vision, sight is , a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in the world could interpret Jean's visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he'd barely been able to make sense of those shapes for years.

  She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.

  Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like the heavy end of a teeter-totter: at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the stratosphere.

  This was Jean. They have no idea, Stavros thought, what you're capable of.

  She woke up screaming.

  "It's all right, Jean, I'm here." He kept his voice calm to help her calm down.

  Jean's temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. "Oh, God," she said.

  "Another nightmare?"

  "Oh, God." Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocortical analogs off the scale. It could have been the telemetry of a rape.

  He thought of short-circuiting those responses. Half a dozen tweaks would make her happy. But half a dozen tweaks would also turn her into someone else. There is no personality beyond the chemical — and while Jean's mind was fashioned from electrons rather than proteins, analogous rules applied.

  "I'm here, Jean," he repeated. A good parent knew when to step in, and when suffering was necessary for growth. "It's okay. It's okay."

  Eventually, she settled down.

  "Nightmare." There were sparks in the parietal subroutines, a tremor lingering in her voice. "It doesn't fit, Stav. Scary dreams, that's the definition. But that implies there's some other kind, and I can't — I mean, why is it always like this? Was it always like this?"

  "I don't know." No, it wasn't.

  She sighed. "These words I learn, none of them really seem to fit anything exactly, you know?"

  "They're just symbols, Jean." He grinned. At times like this he could almost forget the source of those dreams, the stunted, impoverished existence of some half-self trapped in distant meat. Andrew Goravec's act of cowardice had freed her from that prison, for a while at least. She soared now, released to full potential. She mattered.

  "Symbols. That's what dreams are supposed to be, but… I don't know. There're all these references to dreams in the library, and none of them seem that much different from just being awake. And when I am asleep, it's all just — screams, almost, only dopplered down. Really sludgy. And shapes. Red shapes." A pause. "I hate bedtime."

  "Well, you're awake now. What are you up for today?"

  "I'm not sure. I need to get away from this place."

  He didn't know what place she meant. By default she woke up in the house, an adult residence designed for human sensibilities. There were also parks and forests and oceans, instantly accessible. By now, though, she'd changed them all past his ability to recognize.

  But it was only a matter of time before her parents wanted her back. Whatever she wants, Stavros told himself. As long as she's here. Whatever she wants.

  "I want out," Jean said.

  Except that. "I know," he sighed.

  "Maybe then I can leave these nightmares behind."

  Stavros closed his eyes, wished there was some way to be with her. Really with her, with this glorious, transcendent creature who'd never known him as anything but a disembodied voice.

  "Still having a hard time with that monster?" Jean asked.

  "Monster?"

  "You know. The bureaucracy."

  He nodded, smiling — then, remembering, said, "Yeah. Always the same story, day in, day out."

  Jean snorted. "I'm still not convinced that thing even exists, you know. I checked the library for a slightly less wonky definition, but now I think you and the library are both screwed in the head."

  He winced at the epithet; it was certainly nothing he'd ever taught her. "How so?"

  "Oh, right, Stav. Like natural selection would ever produce a hive-based entity whose sole function is to sit with its thumb up its collective butt being inefficient. Tell me another one."

  A silence, stretching. He watched as microcurrent trickled through her prefrontal cortex.

  "You there, Stav?" she said at last.

  "Yeah, I'm here." He chuckled, quietly. Then: "You know I love you, right?"

  "Sure," she said easily. "Whatever that is."

  Jean's environment changed then; an easy unthinking transition for her, a gasp-inducing wrench between bizarre realities for Stavros. Phantoms sparkled at the edge of his vision, vanishing when he focused on them. Light bounced from a million indefinable facets, diffuse, punctuated by a myriad of pinpoint staccatos. There was no ground or walls or ceiling. No restraints along any axis.

  Jean reached for a shadow in the air and sat upon it, floating. "I think I'll read Through the Looking Glass again. At least someone else lives in the real world."

  "The changes that happen here are your own doing, Jean," said Stavros. "Not the machinations of any, any God or author."

  "I know. But Alice makes me feel a little more — ordinary." Reality shifted abruptly once more; Jean was in the park now, or rather, what Stavros thought of as the park. Sometimes he was afraid to ask if her interpretation had stayed the same. Above, light and dark spots danced across a sky that sometimes seemed impressively vault-like, seconds later oppressively close, even its colour endlessly unsettled. Animals large and small, squiggly yellow lines and shapes and colour-shifting orange and burgundy pies. Other things that might have been representations of life, or mathematical theorems — or both — browsed in the distance.

  Seeing through Jean's eyes was never easy. But all this unsettling abstraction was a small price to pay for
the sheer pleasure of watching her read.

  My little girl.

  Symbols appeared around her, doubtless the text of Looking Glass. To Stavros it was gibberish. A few recognizable letters, random runes, formulae. They switched places sometimes, seamlessly shifting one into another, flowing around and through and beside — or even launching themselves into the air like so many dark-hued butterflies.

  He blinked his eyes and sighed. If he stayed much longer the visuals would give him a headache that would take a day to shake. Watching a life lived at such speed, even for such a short time, took its toll.

  "Jean, I'm gone for a little while."

  "Company business?" she asked.

  "You could say that. We'll talk soon, love. Enjoy your reading."

  *

  Barely ten minutes had passed in meatspace.

  Jeannie's parents had put her on her own special cot. It was one of the few real pieces of solid geometry allowed in the room. The whole compartment was a stage, virtually empty. There was really no need for props; sensations were planted directly into Jean's occipital cortex, spliced into her auditory pathways, pushing back against her tactile nerves in precise forgeries of touchable things. In a world made of lies, real objects would be a hazard to navigation.

  "God damn you, she's not a fucking toaster," Kim spat at her husband. Evidently the icy time-out had expired; the battle had resumed.

  "Kim, what was I supposed to—"

  "She's a child, Andy. She's our child."

  "Is she." It was a statement, not a question.

  "Of course she is!"

  "Fine." Andrew took the remote from his pocket held it out to her. "You wake her up, then."

  She stared at him without speaking for a few seconds. Over the pickups, Stavros heard Jeannie's body breathing into the silence.