The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  Something had shifted, now, in his face. Something was harder, older, stronger.

  “Hey,” I said, bear-hugging him, and eventually he submitted. He hugged me back hesitantly, like a man might, and then hard, like a little boy.

  “What’s happening?” I asked. “What were you up to, last night?”

  Thede shrugged. “Stuff. With friends.”

  I asked him questions. Again the sullen, bitter silence; again the terse and angry answers. Again the eyes darting around, constantly watching for whatever the next attack would be. Again the hating me, for coming here, for making him.

  “I’m going away,” I said. “A job.”

  “I figured,” he said.

  “I wish I didn’t have to.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t tell him it was a twelve-month gig. Not now.

  “Here,” I said, finally, pulling the package out from inside of my jacket. “I got you something.”

  “Thanks.” He grabbed it in both hands, began to tear it open.

  “Wait,” I said, thinking fast. “Okay? Open it after I leave.”

  Open it when the news that I’m leaving has set in, when you’re mad at me, for abandoning you. When you think I care only about my job.

  “We’ll have a little time,” he said. “When you get back. Before I go away. I leave in eight months. The program is four years long.”

  “Sure,” I said, shivering inside.

  “Mom says she’ll pay for me to come home every year for the holiday, but she knows we can’t afford that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “‘Come home.’ I thought you were going to the Institute.”

  “I am,” he said, sighing. “Do you even know what that means? The Institute’s design program is in Shanghai.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Design. What kind of design?”

  My son’s eyes rolled. “You’re missing the point, dad.”

  I was. I always was.

  A shout, from a pub across the Arm. A man’s shout, full of pain and anger. Thede flinched. His hands made fists.

  “What?” I asked, thinking, here, at last, was something.

  “Nothing.”

  “You can tell me. What’s going on?”

  Thede frowned, then punched the metal railing so hard he yelped. He held up his hand to show me the blood.

  “Hey, Thede—”

  “Han,” he said. “My … my friend. He got jumped two nights ago. Soaked.”

  “This city is horrible,” I whispered.

  He made a baffled face. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean … you know. This city. Everyone’s so full of anger and cruelty…”

  “It’s not the city, dad. What does that even mean? Some sick person did this. Han was waiting for me, and mom wouldn’t let me out, and he got jumped. They took off all his clothes, before they rolled him into the water. That’s some extra cruel shit right there. He could have died. He almost did.”

  I nodded, silently, a siren of panic rising inside. “You really care about this guy, don’t you?”

  He looked at me. My son’s eyes were whole, intact, defiant, adult. Thede nodded.

  He’s been getting bullied, his mother had told me. He’s in love.

  I turned away from him, before he could see the knowledge blossom in my eyes.

  The shirt hadn’t been stolen. He’d given it away. To the boy he loved. I saw them holding hands, saw them tug at each other’s clothing in the same fumbling adolescent puppy-love moments I had shared with his mother, moments that were my only happy memories from being his age. And I saw his fear, of how his backwards father might react—a refugee from a fallen hate-filled people—if he knew what kind of man he was. I gagged on the unfairness of his assumptions about me, but how could he have known differently? What had I ever done, to show him the truth of how I felt about him? And hadn’t I proved him right? Hadn’t I acted exactly like the monster he believed me to be? I had never succeeded in proving to him what I was, or how I felt.

  I had battered and broken his beloved. There was nothing I could say. A smarter man would have asked for the present back, taken it away and locked it up. Burned it, maybe. But I couldn’t. I had spent his whole life trying to give him something worthy of how I felt about him, and here was the perfect gift at last.

  “I love you, Thede,” I said, and hugged him.

  “Daaaaad…” he said, eventually.

  But I didn’t let go. Because when I did, he would leave. He would walk home through the cramped and frigid alleys of his home city, to the gift of knowing what his father truly was.

  Emergence

  GWYNETH JONES

  One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in science fiction, with her 1991 novel White Queen, and has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, with her novel Bold as Love, as well as receiving two World Fantasy Awards, for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection Seven Tales and a Fable. Her other books include the novels North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, Divine Endurance, Phoenix Café, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Ironwood, The Exchange, Dear Hill, Escape Plans, The Hidden Ones, and Rainbow Bridge, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits, and in other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Seven Tales and a Fable. She is also the author of the critical study, Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality. Among her recent books are a novel, Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant, and two collections, The Buonarotti Quartet and The Universe of Things. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

  All of us face hard choices in our lives, particularly choices about how to live our lives. As the highly inventive story that follows demonstrates, however, in the future those choices will include some choices that we could never imagine. They’ll remain hard, though.

  I faced the doctor across her desk. The room was quiet, the walls were pale or white, but somehow I couldn’t see details. There was a blank in my mind, no past to this moment; everything blurred by the adrenalin in my blood.

  “You have three choices,” she said gently. “You can upload; you can download. Or you must return.”

  My reaction to those terms, upload, download, was embarrassing. I tried to hide it and knew I’d failed.

  “Go back?” I said bitterly, and in defiance. “To the city of broken dreams? Why would I ever want to do that?”

  “Don’t be afraid, Romy. The city of broken dreams may have become the city of boundless opportunity.”

  Then I woke up: Simon’s breathing body warm against my side, Arc’s unsleeping presence calm in my cloud. A shimmering, starry night above us and the horror of that doctor’s tender smile already fading.

  It was a dream, just a dream.

  With a sigh of profound relief I reached up to pull my stars closer, and fell asleep again floating among them; thinking about Lei.

  I was born in the year 1998, CE. My parents named me Romanz Jolie Davison; I have lived a long, long time. I’ve been upgrading since “uppers” were called experimental longevity treatments. I was a serial-clinical-trialer, when genuine extended lifespan was brand-new. Lei was someone I met through this shared interest; this extreme sport. We were friends, then lovers; and then ex-lovers who didn’t meet for many years, until one day we found each other again: on the first big Habitat Station, in the future we’d been so determined to see (talk about “meeting cute”!). But Lei had always been the risk taker, the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid. I was the cautious one. I’d never taken an unsafe treatment, and I’d been careful with my money too (you need money to do super-extended lifespan well). We had our reu
nion and drifted apart, two lives that didn’t mesh. One day, when I hadn’t seen her for a while, I found out she’d gone back to Earth on medical advice.

  Had we kept in touch at all? I had to check my cache, which saddened me, although it’s only a mental eye-blink. Apparently not. She’d left without a goodbye, and I’d let her go. I wondered if I should try to reach her. But what would I say? I had a bad dream, I think it was about you, are you okay? I needed a better reason to pick up the traces, soI did nothing.

  Then I had the same dream again; exactly the same. I woke up terrified, and possessed by an absurd puzzle: had I really just been sitting in that fuzzy doctor’s office again? Or had I only dreamed I was having the same dream? A big Space Station is a haunted place, saturated with information that swims into your head and you have no idea how. Sometimes a premonition really is a premonition: so I asked Station to trace her. The result was that time-honored brush-off: it has not been possible to connect this call.

  Relieved, I left it at that.

  I was, I am, one of four Senior Magistrates on the Outer Reaches circuit. In Jupiter Moons, my home town, and Outer Reaches’ major population center, I often deal with Emergents. They account for practically all our petty offenses, sad to say. Full sentients around here are too law-abiding, too crafty to get caught, or too seriously criminal for my jurisdiction.

  Soon after my dreams about Lei a young SE called Beowulf was up before me, on a charge of Criminal Damage and Hooliganism. The incident was undisputed. A colleague, another Software Entity, had failed to respond “you too” to the customary and friendly sign-off “have a nice day.” In retaliation Beowulf had shredded a stack of files in CPI (Corporate and Political Interests, our Finance Sector); where they both worked.

  The offense was pitiful, but the kid had a record. He’d run out of chances; his background was against him, and CPI had decided to make a meal of it. Poor Beowulf, a thing of rational light, wearing an ill-fitting suit of virtual flesh for probably the first time in his life, stood penned in his archaic, data-simulacrum of wood and glass, for two mortal subjective hours; while the CPI advocate and Beowulf’s public defender scrapped over the price of a cup of coffee.

  Was Beowulf’s response proportionate? Was there an intention of offense? Was it possible to establish, by precedent, that “you too” had the same or comensurate “customary and friendly” standing, in law, as “have a nice day”?

  Poor kid, it was a real pity he’d tried to conceal the evidence.

  I had to find him guilty, no way around it.

  I returned to macro-time convinced I could at least transmute his sentence, but my request ran into a Partnership Director I’d crossed swords with before: she was adamant and we fell out. We couldn’t help sharing our quarrel. No privacy for anyone in public office: it’s the law out here and I think a good one. But we could have kept it down. The images we flung to and fro were lurid. I recall eyeballs dipped in acid, a sleep-pod lined with bloody knives … and then we got nasty. The net result (aside from childish entertainment for idle citizens) was that I was barred from the case. Eventually I found out, by reading the court announcements, that Beowulf’s sentence had been confirmed in the harshest terms. Corrective custody until a validated improvement was shown, but not less than one week.

  In Outer Reaches we use expressions like “night, and day,” “week, and hour,” without meaning much at all. Not so the Courts. A week in jail meant the full Earth Standard version, served in macro-time.

  I’d been finding the Court Sessions tiring that rotation, but I walked home anyway; to get over my chagrin and unkink my brain after a day spent switching in and out of virtual time. I stopped at every Ob Bay making out I was hoping to spot the first flashes of the spectacular Centaur Storm we’d been promised. But even the celestial weather was out to spoil my day: updates kept telling me about a growing chance that show had been canceled.

  My apartment was in the Rim, Premium Level; it still is. (Why not? I can afford it). Simon and Arc welcomed me home with bright, ancient music for a firework display. They’d cleared the outward wall of our living space to create our own private Ob Bay, and were refusing to believe reports that it was all in vain. I cooked a meal, with Simon flying around me to help out, deft and agile in the rituals of a human kitchen. Arc, as a slender woman, bare-headed, dressed in silver-gray coveralls, watched us from her favorite couch.

  Simon and Arc … They sounded like a firm of architects, as I often told them (I repeat myself, it’s a privilege of age). They were probably, secretly responsible for the rash of fantasy spires and bubbles currently annoying me, all over Station’s majestic open spaces—

  “Why is Emergent Individual law still set in human terms?” I demanded. “Why does a Software Entity get punished for ‘criminal damage’ when nothing was damaged; not for more than a fraction of a millisecond—?”

  My housemates rolled their eyes. “It’ll do him good,” said Arc. “Only a human-terms thinker would think otherwise.”

  I was in for some tough love.

  “What kind of a dreadful name is Beowulf, anyway?” inquired Simon.

  “Ancient Northern European. Beowulf was a monster—” I caught myself, recalling I had no privacy.” No! Correction.The monster was Grendel. Beowulf was the hero, a protector of his people. It’s aspirational.”

  “He is a worm though, isn’t he?”

  I sighed and took up my delicious bowl of Tom Yum; swimming with chilli pepper glaze. “Yes,” I said glumly. “He’s ethnically worm, poor kid.”

  “Descended from a vicious little virus strain,” Arc pointed out. “He has tendencies. He can’t help it, but we have to be sure they’re purged.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so prejudiced.”

  “Humans are so squeamish,” teased Simon.

  “Humans are human,” said Arc. “That’s the fun of them.”

  They were always our children, begotten not created, as the old saying goes. There’s no such thing as a sentient AI not born of human mind. But never purely human: Simon, my embodied housemate, had magpie neurons in his background. Arc took human form for pleasure, but her being was pure information, the elemental stuff of the universe. They had gone beyond us, as children do. We had become just one strand in their past—

  The entry lock chimed. It was Anton, my clerk, a slope-shouldered, barrel-chested bod with a habitually doleful expression. He looked distraught.

  “Apologies for disturbing you at home, Rom. May I come in?”

  He sat on Arc’s couch, silent and grim. Two of my little dream-tigers, no bigger than geckos, emerged from the miniature jungle of our bamboo and teak room divider and sat gazing at him, tails around their paws.

  “Those are pretty…” said Anton at last. “New. Where’d you get them?”

  “I made them myself, I’ll share the code with you. What’s up, Anton?”

  “We’ve got trouble. Beowulf didn’t take the confirmation well.”

  I noticed that my ban had been lifted: a bad sign. “What’s the damage?”

  “Oh, nothing much. It’s in your updates, of which you’ll find a ton. He’s only removed himself from custody—”

  “Oh, God. He’s back in CPI?”

  “No. Our hero had a better idea.”

  Having feared revenge instantly, I felt faint with relief.

  “But he’s been traced?”

  “You bet. He’s taken a hostage, and a non-sentient Lander. He’s heading for the surface, right now.”

  The little tigers laid back their ears and sneaked out of sight. Arc’s human form drew a long, respectful breath. “What are you guys going to do?”

  “Go after him. What else?” I was at the lockers, dragging out my gear.

  * * *

  Jupiter Moons has no police force. We don’t have much of anything like that: everyone does everything. Of course I was going with the Search and Rescue, Beowulf was my responsibility. I didn’t argue when Simon and Arc insisted on com
ing too. I don’t like to think of them as my minders; or my curators, but they are both, and I’m a treasured relic. Simon equipped himself with a heavy-duty hard suit, in which he and Arc would travel freight. Anton and I would travel cabin. Our giant neighbor was in a petulant mood, so we had a Mag-Storm Drill in the Launch Bay. In which we heard from our Lander that Jovian magnetosphere storms are unpredictable. Neural glitches caused by wayward magnetism, known as soft errors, build up silently, and we must watch each other for signs of disorientation or confusion. Physical burnout, known as hard error, is very dangerous; more frequent than people think, and fatal accidents do happen—

  It was housekeeping. None of us paid much attention.

  Anton, one of those people always doomed to “fly the plane” would spend the journey in horrified contemplation of the awful gravitational whirlpools that swarm around Jupiter Moons, even on a calm day. We left him in peace, poor devil, and ran scenarios. We had no contact with the hostage, a young pilot just out of training. We could only hope she hadn’t been harmed. We had no course for the vehicle: Beowulf had evaded basic safety protocols and failed to enter one. But Europa is digitially mapped, and well within the envelope of Jupiter Moons’ data cloud. We knew exactly where the stolen Lander was, before we’d even left Station’s gravity.

  Cardew, our team leader, said it looked like a crash landing, but a soft crash. The hostage, though she wasn’t talking, seemed fine. Thankfully the site wasn’t close to any surface or sub-ice installation, and Mag Storm precautions meant there was little immediate danger to anyone. But we had to assume the worst, and the worst was scary, so we’d better get the situation contained.

  We sank our screws about 500 meters from Beowulf’s vehicle, with a plan worked out. Simon and Arc, already dressed for the weather, disembarked at once. Cardew and I, plus his four-bod ground team, climbed into exos: checked each other, and stepped onto the lift, one by one.