Best Science Fiction of the Year 14

by Terry Carr (ed)

  "What'll you have?" Hans was back, his forehead smudged black where he had incompletely wiped off his facepaint.

  "—a little warning. Oh, I don't know, Hans. Whatever you have on tap."

  "That'll be Chanty. You?" he asked Elin.

  "What's good?"

  He laughed. "There's no such thing as a good lunar wine. The air's too moist. And even if it weren't, it takes a good century to develop an adequate vineyard. But the Chanty is your basic, drinkable glug."

  "I'll take that, then."

  "Good. I'll bring a mug for your friend, too."

  "My friend?" She turned and saw a giant striding through the trees, towering over them, pushing them apart with two enormous hands. For a dizzy instant, she goggled in disbelief, and then the man shrank to human stature as she remembered the size of the saplings.

  He grinned. "Hi. Remember me?"

  He was a tall man, but like a spacejack, lean and angular. An untidy mass of black curls framed a face that was not quite handsome but carried an intense freight of will.

  "I'm afraid…"

  "Tory Shostakovich. I reprogrammed you."

  She studied his face carefully. Those eyes. They were fierce almost to the point of mania, but there was sadness there, too, and—she thought she might be making this up—a hint of pleading, like a little boy who wants something so desperately he dare not ask for it. She could lose herself in analyzing the nuances of those eyes. "Yes," she said at last, "I remember you now."

  "I'm pleased." He nodded to the Jesuit. "Father Landis."

  She eyed him skeptically. "You don't seem your usual morose self, Shostokovich. Is anything wrong?"

  "No, it's just a special kind of morning." He smiled at some private joke, returned his attention to Elin. "I thought I'd drop by and get acquainted with my former patient." He glanced down at the ground, fleetingly shy, and then his eyes were bright and audacious again.

  How charming, Elin thought. She hoped that he wasn't too shy. And then she had to glance away herself, the thought was so unlike her. "So you're a wetware surgeon," she said inanely.

  Hans reappeared to distribute mugs of wine, then retreated to the cave's mouth. He sat down, workboard in lap, and patched in the skull-plugs. His face went stiff as the wetware took hold.

  "Actually," Tory said, "I very rarely work as a wetsurgeon. An accident like yours is rare, you know—maybe once, twice a year. Mostly I work in wetware development. Currently I'm on the Star Maker project.''

  "I've heard that name before. Just what is it anyway?"

  Tory didn't answer immediately. He stared down into the lake, a cool breeze from above ruffling his curls. Elin caught her breath. / hardly know this man, she thought wildly. He pointed to the island in the center of the lake, a thin, stony finger that was originally the crater's thrust cone.

  "God lives on that island," he said.

  Elin laughed. "Think how different history would be if He'd only had a sense of direction!" She wanted to bite her tongue when she realized that he was not joking.

  "You're being cute, Shostokovich," Landis warned. She swigged down a mouthful of wine. "Jeez, that's vile stuff."

  Tory rubbed the back of his neck ruefully. "Mea culpa. Well, let me give you a little background. Most people think of wetware as being software for people. But that's too simplistic, because with machines you start out blank—with a clean slate—and with people, there's some ten million years of mental programming already crammed into their heads.

  "So to date we've been working with the natural wetware.

  We counterfeit surface traits—patience, alertness, creativity— and package them like so many boxes of bonemeal. But the human mind is vast and unmapped, and it's time to move into the interior, for some basic research.

  "That's the Star Maker project. It's an exploration of the basic substructural programming of the mind. We've redefined the overstructure programs into an integrated system we believe will be capable of essence-programming, in one-to-one congruence with the inherent substructure of the universe.''

  "What jargonistic rot!" Landis gestured at Elin's stoneware mug. "Drink up. The Star Maker is a piece of experimental theology that IGF dreamed up. As Tory said, it's basic research into the nature of the mind. The Vatican Synod is providing funding so we can keep an eye on it."

  "Nipping heresy in the bud," Tory said sourly.

  "That's a good part of it. This set of wetware will supposedly reshape a human mind into God. Bad theology, but there it is. They want to computer-model the infinite. Anyway, the specs were drawn up, and it was tried out on—what was the name of the test subject?"

  "Doesn't matter," Tory said quickly.

  "Coral something-or-other."

  Only half-listening by now, Elin unobtrusively studied Tory. He sat, legs wide, staring into his mug of Chanty. There were hard lines on his face, etched by who knew what experiences. / don't believe in love at first sight, Elin thought. Then again, who knew what she might believe in anymore? It was a chilling thought, and she retreated from it.

  "So did this Coral become God?"

  "Patience. Anyway, the volunteer was plugged in, wiped, reprogrammed, and interviewed. Nothing useful."

  "In one hour," Tory said, "we learned more about the structure and composition of the universe than in all of history to date."

  "It was deranged gibberish." Landis tapped Elin's knee. "We interviewed her and then canceled the wetware. And what do you think happened?"

  "I've never been big on rhetorical questions." Elin didn't take her eyes off Tory.

  "She didn't come down. She was stuck."

  "Stuck?"

  Tory plucked a blade of grass, let it fall. "What happened was that we had rewired her to absolute consciousness. She was not only aware of all her mental functions but in control of them—right down to the involuntary reflexes, which also put her in charge of her own metaprogrammer."

  "Metaprogrammer is just a buzzword for a bundle of reflexes the brain uses to make changes in itself," Landis threw in.

  "Yeah. What we didn't take into account, though, was that she'd like being God. When we tried deprogramming her, she simply overrode our instructions and reprogrammed herself back up."

  "The poor woman," Elin said. And yet—what a glorious experience to be God! Something within her thrilled to it. It would almost be worth the price.

  "Which leaves us with a woman who thinks she's God," Landis said. "I'm just glad we were able to hush it up. If word got out to some of those religious illiterates back on Earth—"

  "Listen," Tory said. "I didn't really come here to talk shop. I wanted to invite my former patient on a grand tour of the Steam Grommet Works."

  Elin looked at him blankly. "Steam…"

  He swept an arm to take in all of Margritte, the green pillars and gray cliffs alike. There was something proprietary in his gesture.

  Landis eyed him suspiciously. "You two might need a chaperone," she said. "I think I'll tag along to keep you out of trouble."

  Elin smiled sweetly. "Fuck off," she said.

  Ivy covered Tory's geodesic trellis hut. He led the way in, stooping to touch a keyout by the doorway. "Something classical?"

  "Please." As he began removing her jumpsuit, the holotape sprang into being, surrounding them with rich reds and cobalt blues that coalesced into stained-glass patterns in the air. Elin pulled back and clapped her hands. "It's Chartres," she cried, delighted. "The cathedral at Chartres!"

  "Mmmmm." Tory teased her down onto the grass floor.

  The north rose swelled to fill the hut. It was all angels and doves, kings and prophets, with gold lilies surrounding the central rosette. Deep and powerful, infused with gloomy light, it lap-dissolved into the lancet of Saint Anne.

  The windows wheeled overhead as the holotape panned down the north transept to the choir, to the apse, and then up into the ambulatory. Swiftly, then, it cut to the wounded Christ and the Beasts of Revelation set within the dark spaces of the west rose.
The outer circle—the instruments of the Passion—closed about them.

  Elin gasped.

  The tape moved down the nave, still brightening, briefly pausing at the Vendome chapel. Until finally the oldest window, the Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere, blazed in a frenzy of raw glory. A breeze rattled the ivy, and two leaves fell through the hologram to tap against their skin and slide to the ground.

  The Belle Verriere faded in the darkening light, and the colors ran and were washed away by a noiseless gust of rain.

  Elin let herself melt into the grass, drained and lazy, not caring if she never moved again. Beside her Tory chuckled, playfully tickled her ribs. "Do you love me? Hey, tell me you love me."

  "Stop!" She grabbed his arms and bit him in the side—a small, nipping bite, more threat than harm—ran a tongue over his left nipple. "Hey, listen, I hit the sack with you a half hour after we met. What do you want?"

  "Want?" He broke her hold, rolled over on top of her, pinioning her wrists above her head. "I want you to know"— and suddenly he was absolutely serious, his eyes unblinking and glittery hard—"that I love you. Without doubt or qualification. I love you more than words could ever say."

  "Tory," she said. "Things like that take time." The wind had died down. Not a blade of grass stirred.

  "No they don't." It was embarrassing looking into those eyes; she refused to look away. "I feel it. I know it. I love every way, shape, and part of you. I love you beyond time and barrier and possibility. We were meant to be lovers, fated for it, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that could ever keep us apart." His voice was low and steady. Elin couldn't tell whether she was thrilled or scared out of her wits.

  "Tory, I don't know—"

  "Then wait," he said. "It'll come."

  * * *

  Lying sleepless beside Tory that night, Elin thought back to her accident. And because it was a matter of stored memory, the images were crisp and undamaged.

  It happened at the end of her shift on Wheel Laboratory 19, Henry Ford Orbital Industrial Park.

  Holding theta lab flush against the hub cylinder, Elin injected ferrous glass into a molten copper alloy. Simultaneously, she plunged gamma lab a half kilometer to the end of its arm, taking it from fractional Greenwich normal to a full nine gravities. Epsilon began crawling up its spindly arm. Using waldos, she lifted sample wafers from the quick-freeze molds in omicron. There were a hundred measurements to be made.

  Elin felt an instant's petulant boredom, and the workboard readjusted her wetware, jacking up her attentiveness so that she leaned over her readouts in cool, detached fascination.

  The workboard warned her that the interfacing program was about to be shut off. Her fingers danced across the board, damping down reactions, putting the labs to bed. The wetware went quiescent.

  With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall—her replacement was late. Corporation regs gave her fifty percent of his missed-time fines if she turned him in. It was easy money, and so she waited.

  Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires dangling from the back of her skull. She lazily put off yanking them.

  Earth bloomed underfoot, slowly crept upward. New Detroit and New Chicago rose from the floor. Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side of the twin residential cylinders.

  A bit of motion caught Elin's eye, and she swiveled to follow a load of cargo drifting by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the park.

  A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the lashings. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

  The old Elin snorted disdainfully. She started to look away and almost missed seeing it happen.

  In leaning back that fraction more, the cargo hopper had put too much strain on the lashings. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling, end over end, away.

  One end of the lashing was still connected to the anchor carton, and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal—the failed rivet—broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab's hub and spokes.

  The old Elin was still hooting with scornful laughter when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of wiring that should not hav» been exposed.

  Two wires short-circuited, sending a massive power transient surging up through the workboard. Circuits fused and melted. The board went haywire.

  And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin's skull.

  An hour later, when her replacement finally showed, she was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth on the floor. She was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark, gleeful screams.

  Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Elin wandered off to do some thinking.

  There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore. That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences— but she no longer understood that woman, could not sympathize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.

  At a second-terrace cafe that was crowded with off-shift biotechs, Elin rented a table and briefcase. She sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

  As she'd suspected, her new persona was copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from scratch was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to trace herself back to IGF's inventory bank and to determine that duplication of personality was illegal—which presumably meant that the original owner was dead.

  But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer wouldn't tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

  "I think I've exhausted all the resources of self-discovery available to me," she told the Pierrot when he came to collect his tip. "And I've still got half the morning left to kill."

  He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint and smiled politely.

  "It's selective black."

  "Huh?" Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.

  "The algae—it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink." The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark-green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained away through the porous bottom.

  "Oh." There were a few patches of weeds on the island, where drifting soil had settled. "It's funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I've got to be doing something, you know?"

  The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. "I couldn't say." She tapped her forehead. "It's the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that's fine. Otherwise, I can't."

  "I see." Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. "Well, why not? Let's talk shop."

  Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.

  "The lake tempers the climate, see? By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof through the condensers."

  Coral was cute as a button.

  A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it. Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her cafe-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly.

  "We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid-storage cavern below the lake."

  Coral picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond e
yes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even, white teeth nipped at the food.

  "At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm."

  On closer examination—Elin had to squint to see so fine— the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot. There was nothing there; no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect.

  "That's why the number of waterfalls in operation varies."

  Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react.

  What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappointing. Even—no, make that especially—God. And she still had almost a month to kill.

  "Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act," the agtech said.

  "Oh, shut up." Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. "I'm bored," she said, when the hologram had stablized.

  Landis hardly glanced up from her work. "So get a job," she snapped.

  Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater was owned by a consortium of operations legally debarred from locating Earthside.

  From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patchwork clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some separated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ-warfare corporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

  "You realize," Tory said, "that I'm not going to be at all happy about this development." He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.