Analog SFF, April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She cut the thread she had in her hand and held it up to the light. It was furrier than Bear, and wider, but clearly a dog. “Cindy helped me make it."

  Her friend, who quilted and had a sewing machine. “It's for Caroline?"

  "For Christmas."

  The plush doggie sat overnight in the kitchen. Aliss took two cups of tea upstairs, and we sat together, looking out past Frankenbot and petting Bear. Aliss looked as beautiful as they day we'd moved in, maybe more so because of the fierce determination in her face. Somehow, she was going to win this lost girl over. I folded her in my arms, whispering, “I love you,” feeling her breath and her beating heart, smelling the tea and the wet dog and all the things that made our house feel like a home.

  In the morning, before she started working, Aliss tucked the dog into a cheerful red and green tote bag. When we broke for our lunchtime walk, she tucked the gift under her arm. It was cold and clear, the ghosts of our breath visible. We paused to admire the three silver deer grazing in the corner of the front yard while a squirrel chattered at them from a tree branch. As we turned from our driveway onto the main road, we stopped suddenly, our feet stuck to the soft pavement. Even Bear, who growled low in his throat.

  I thought about growling, too, but decided not to do it.

  A long black car had pulled up into the driveway in front of Caroline's and the robots’ house. Her parents? Had she hurt herself? Was she leaving? The idea made me happy and sad all together. The limousine must have just arrived since the hood still steamed in the cold air, and it must have come in the back way since they hadn't passed us.

  The doors opened and a stooped old woman got out of the driver's seat. She went and stood by the door, looking at it expectantly. All three guardbots swirled around her feet, petting her like cats. The other doors opened all at once, synchronously, and three gleaming robots rose at once from the car. I recognized them from the same catalog we'd bought the deer, with the same “smoother-than-possible skin made of a million million nanobeings.” They'd all been marketed as the next thing in robotic materials and lifelike movement.

  The front door opened, and Ruby, Roberto, and the garden bot all walked out, all of them looking downright tarnished next to the new ones. If you looked at them by themselves, they gleamed. But the newer ones were brilliant suns.

  Roberto, Ruby, and the gardenbot all looked sad. I thought of the deer, which looked happy even though they were neither happy nor sad, and reminded myself the robots certainly weren't feeling anything at all. I had to be making it up in my head, and it was silly that I suddenly wanted to know the name of the gardenbot with her silver shears and red bucket.

  Caroline trailed behind them. The look on her face drove me forward as far as the property line. Her eyes were red from crying. In the months we'd been watching her, luring her, worrying about her, she'd never cried. Not that we'd seen. She was tough.

  The three new robots stood to the side, waiting. They gleamed. All of their clothes were new.

  The three old robots slid down into the seats of the big car, smooth as butter, silken as silver, the move both simple and final.

  Caroline buried her face in her hands.

  Aliss let out a soft squeak of pain so deep it forced me forward, across the line and over to where the old woman stood beside Caroline, watching her, but not touching her. I had Bear with me, close in case the guardbots turned away from the old woman. Aliss followed by my side, her face as stricken as Caroline's. I didn't understand what was going on except the obvious; this woman was taking Caroline's family and giving her a better, newer one.

  The woman herself had steel in her eyes, human steel. She looked at least seventy, slightly shrunken and bowed. But not a bit frail. I shouldn't have been at all surprised when she said, “Hello, Aliss and Paul."

  I glanced around for Caroline and found her standing by the door Roberto had slid into, watching us and clutching the door handle all at once. It appeared to be locked.

  I tried to keep as much control in my voice as possible as I looked back at the old woman. “And you are?"

  "Jilly."

  I'd heard the name. The first day we were on this property. “You're Caroline's head of security?"

  "And you can tell us where her parents are.” Aliss hissed over my shoulder. “And why she's been left all alone.” Her voice rose enough to make me wince and feel proud all at once. “And why she can't ever leave, and she can't even pet the dog.” She glanced down at Bear who was looking between Jilly and his obviously upset Aliss as if trying to decide who bore the most watching. “Why she can't come see our deer and can't even eat my cookies!"

  The woman appeared nonplussed by Aliss's outburst.

  Caroline's eyes had widened, but she said nothing. The fear in her eyes was worse than I'd ever seen it. Except this time she wasn't looking at me. Poor kid.

  I took a deep breath and added to Aliss's list. “And why you're taking the only family she has."

  Caroline yelled at me. “It's the deer. Your damned deer were better than Roberto and Ruby, and Jilly can't stand that."

  She finally sounded like a preteen girl. But this wasn't the moment to heartily approve.

  Jilly responded with a quiet and sure voice. “No. Your help gets upgraded every three years, and you know that. It's simply time."

  "It's the deer,” Caroline insisted.

  I tried to sound calm, but my voice still shook. “They're Christmas decorations.” She probably changed the robots because they came over to see the deer. I could still picture Ruby's silver finger reaching toward the fawn's silver nose.

  "Does she ever see her parents?” Aliss demanded. “Do they bother?"

  The seven-footed roboguards began to circle the old woman restlessly. She gave them hand signals and they stopped, all three of them between us and her. “You're overstepping your bounds. I have no legal right to kill you, but I can take any unleashed dog."

  Aliss drew in a sharp breath.

  A bright red light played along Bear's leash, just below my hand.

  Caroline cried out, “No!"

  "Then go in the house,” Jilly said.

  Caroline had to pass us to go in. Aliss handed her the tote bag. Surprisingly, Jilly said nothing, but allowed Caroline to take it into the house. The three new bots followed her, gliding even more smoothly than the old ones.

  I looked at the woman and said, “When Roberto mentioned you, I assumed you were another robot. Now that I've met you, I wish my first guess had been right. You can't give her a family of robots and then take them away.” My hands shook. Part fear, part anger. Of course, we should never have let it continue. Calling the cops once shouldn't have been enough. The poor, poor kid.

  Jilly's lips thinned, and for a moment she looked like all of the irascible old women I'd ever met. She probably had two thousand dollars worth of clothes on, and more in jewelry. Thousands of dollars worth of robots swirled around her feet. She looked like stone.

  Allis pleaded, “Please. Leave the robots."

  No change. But then something more vulnerable flashed across Jilly's eyes and the corners of her mouth softened. She took a deep breath. “Her parents are dead. They died seven years ago. Her grandmother pays for her care, and I take care of her grandmother. That's all I can do. There is no one else. If anything happens to either of us, Caroline could end up in the state's hands."

  She waited, let us absorb this. Maybe the woman said this so we'd stop harassing her, maybe because it was true. She was old enough to be the grandmother or the friend of the grandmother. Between being raised by Roberto and Ruby or the State of Washington, it was a tough call.

  Aliss's arm snaked around my waist. I'd had a few friends in foster care in high school. One had done well, gone on to college, turned into a lawyer. One had been raped and otherwise ignored by her foster parents and the state. Caroline was old to be adopted easily. And rich, apparently. The state might “need” her money. And even if well intentioned, how would they deal
with a kid who knew advanced physics? Would they let us take her?

  As if Jilly had been reading my mind, she said, “She is safe and halfway through her first bachelor's degree."

  "But she's lonely,” Aliss blurted out. “Can't you see that? Surely there's money? Look at this house! Hire people to take care of her instead of bots."

  Jilly watched us for a long while and then closed her eyes, mumbling. I didn't see a communication loop across her ear, but her gray hair was thick enough to hide one. Surely she was talking to someone. In the meantime, the only movement was Bear trying to watch everything at once and the guardbots trying to watch Bear and us and the perimeter all at once. And us, shivering in the cool wind, which made the ten minutes before Jilly spoke seem like forever. “She had a live-in teacher until two years ago. She outgrew her capabilities, and the . . . circumstances . . . were problematical. Caroline is exceptionally bright, and she is doing better in this situation than in her previous one."

  She sounded like she believed her words completely.

  We stood silent. Surely Aliss felt as struck dumb as me.

  "Caroline is scraping the bottom of the kind of complex physics and math that breaks old men's hearts. She does well with machine teachers."

  "She has no friends!” Aliss blurted. “At least leave her Ruby."

  Jilly stood and watched us, the guardbots floating in agitated tiny circles, drifting up and down, as if restless. At least they'd stopped targeting the leash.

  Caroline's face was pressed to the glass in the second-story window, looking down at us all. She was crying again, her eyes raking the car. In her arms, she clutched the toy dog Aliss had made her. I couldn't see Aliss's face, but I hoped she could see the girl with the dog.

  "When did you change her keepers last?"

  "I think you should leave now,” Jilly said. She punctuated her words with a hand signal that caused the bots to scoot close enough that Bear started barking and snarling. We backed off, but I hated every step. This whole situation was an odd trap, for Caroline for sure, and maybe for us. We stood to the side of the driveway and gave the long black limousine plenty of time to pull away.

  "Boy, I thought I hated this before,” Aliss said. She wasn't crying, but she'd gone still and angry.

  "Did you see Caroline with the dog? I think she likes it."

  "I should have sewn in a nail file."

  "Maybe. At least we have more information now. We best keep walking so Bear won't be deprived of his routine."

  So we did. Keep walking. A bit sad. On our return trip, we looked up at the windows of Caroline's house, but she no longer stood looking out. The roboguards made sure we saw them, floating at the edge of the property, as menacing as the first time we saw them. My feet kept dragging, and beautiful Aliss looked far more disturbed than pretty. Although it took a long time, we made it home.

  Even though it was still a few hours before dusk, we both gravitated to the enclosed deck, bundling up under fleece blankets and watching a light wind blow the lowest branches of the trees softly back and forth. It was too early for animals, so all we saw outside were birds; two crows and a Stellar's Jay. Bear settled for his afternoon nap, and I stroked Aliss's hair and wished we'd never moved here, and never seen the robots’ girl, and didn't know about the situation we seemed unable to do anything about. Once Aliss got up and made us both strong-smelling Chai tea, and once we let Bear out at his request, watching him avoid the silver deer like the plague while doing his business. When he came back in, Aliss patted him and held him close. “I hate robots, too."

  "Maybe I should program the deer to walk over there tomorrow."

  She laughed, a little sad. “I'd hate to see them torn up by the nasty bots."

  "Yeah, me too."

  We sat and watched the day slide into darkness, not stirring again until it grew too dark to see each other's expressions and Bear began letting out soft whuffs, asking for his dinner.

  In the kitchen, habit caused me to turn Frankenbot's eyes toward the robot house. I'd almost reached up to turn the controls back when I noticed something different. “Come here, Aliss."

  She was at my side in an instant.

  A big square of something white—maybe butcher paper or poster-board—had been taped to the kitchen window. Words had been hand lettered on it. “You can sit on your deck now."

  Did that mean we could use the deck now because she'd taped something over the window? Or what?

  Aliss seemed more confident than I felt. She took a bottle of syrah and two glasses up the stairs. The door to the bedroom deck slid open silently as we approached it and sat beside Frankenbot, sharing the empty chair. Aliss poured us each half a glass of wine. She raised hers. “To Frankenbot, who represents our first progress.” She stroked Frankenbot's now slightly rusty head almost fondly.

  I wasn't sure we'd made progress, but I sipped my wine anyway. I added my own toast. “To Roberto and Ruby and the nameless gardenbot."

  Aliss laughed.

  Below us, the paper from the window peeled back, and Caroline waved at us.

  Two of the three new robots stood in the kitchen watching her with their shiny silver faces.

  It was too far away for me to tell for sure, but I thought Caroline might be smiling.

  Copyright © 2010 Brenda Cooper

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  Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers

  Prisons have been an element in science fiction ever since the evil goddess Issus tossed Dejah Thoris into that revolving jail cell at the end of The Gods of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1918). More often than not, prison is a plot device, another obstacle that the protagonist must overcome on the way to the happy ending. The Good Guys are thrown in prison, where they must band together with other inmates and find a way to escape. (No, this isn't why science fiction is called “escape literature.") Escape from prison played a major role in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. In the movie Escape From New York and similar tales, getting out of prison is the whole story.

  In other stories, prison is part of the background, a deliberate element in the author's worldbuilding, with a specific impact on the shape of the story. This is often where we find the fine old concept of the “prison planet"—a sort of Australia in space, where criminals and dissidents imprisoned for life make a society, usually one that's superior in some fashion or another. In Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Moon is a prison planet that breaks away from Earth in a parallel to the American Revolution. In Frank Herbert's Dune universe, the Empire's harsh prison planet Salusa Secundus is a breeding ground for the Emperor's personal guard, the most vicious and feared fighters in the galaxy. Alien3 and THX 1138 are both movies in which prisons, one way or another, are part of the background. The classic TV show The Prisoner was set almost entirely in one of the most bizarre prison communities ever conceived (and no, I didn't understand the ending either).

  Then there are those rare sf stories that deal with prison as a concept, usually in the larger context of the moral nature of crime and punishment. In Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, for example, juvenile delinquent Alex accepts psychological conditioning as an alternative to prison time as punishment for his crimes. In “Coventry,” Robert Heinlein had antisocial citizens given a choice between psychological adjustment or exile to an anarchist region separated from the rest of the country by an impenetrable force field. Robert Silverberg's story “To See the Invisible Man” (the basis for a 1986 Twilight Zone episode) substitutes psychological imprisonment for physical, having convicts treated as if they were invisible to others; similarly, in Melissa Scott's The Kindly Ones those who transgress the law are declared “dead” and become socially-invisible “ghosts."

  Science fiction has come up with a number of other innovative ways to handle prisoners. Instead of a prison planet, one can play tricks with time: exile prisoners to the distant past, accelerate their personal time so that a sentence of many subjective years la
sts only minutes or days objectively, or do the reverse and suspend their personal time by freezing or other form of hibernation (this last has been practiced everywhere from Star Trek to Lost in Space). Prisoners can serve their sentences in virtual worlds, robot or android bodies, or some high-tech variation of solitary confinement. In the Red Dwarf episode “Justice,” convicts suffer whatever harm they did to their victims.

  Interestingly enough, the inmates in science fiction prisons are usually not the habitual criminals and incorrigible psychopaths that we imagine occupy present-day prisons. Oh, there are exceptions, truly bad people who usually get their just deserts by the end of the story—but most characters one encounters in sf prisons don't really belong there. If they aren't innocents herded into concentration camps, they are prisoners of war, political prisoners, or just plain malcontents jailed by an establishment that wants them out of the way. If they were actual criminals, they have usually reformed during their time in the slammer. On a prison planet or other prison colony, those who survive are deemed to have proven their moral worth by virtue of that survival. The hapless hero unfairly thrown into prison can always count on finding other unjustly imprisoned individuals as friends and allies. In fact, frequently the hero manages to organize these noble souls into a mass escape or rebellion against the powers that be. The heroic interstellar rebels of Blake's 7 met on board a transport to the evil Federation's prison planet.

  Why don't we see more hardened criminals in sf prisons, or stories dealing with prison-as-punishment-for-crime? For one thing, many science fiction stories implicitly accept the convention of advanced societies in which criminal behavior is regarded as a symptom of mental illness, which is treated or cured. This idea is made explicit in the classic Star Trek episodes “Whom Gods Destroy” and “Dagger of the Mind,” in which two prison planets hold the mere handful of criminally insane inmates who have not yet responded to rehabilitation treatment. Contrariwise, a repressive or totalitarian establishment can usually just execute hardened criminals or wipe their brains and set them to work in the mines (any respectable dictator always has a few mines around). Once you cure (or otherwise eliminate) all the true criminals, what you have left as prisoners are people who, one way or another, don't fit into your enlightened (or repressive) society.