Best Science Fiction of the Year 14

by Terry Carr (ed)

  Until abruptly she was back in her body, and nothing pursued her. She shivered, and her body responded. It felt wonderful.

  "Well, that worked at least," Tory said.

  "What—" her voice croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. "What happened to me?"

  "Just what we'd hoped for—when your mind was threatened with extinction, it protected itself by reprogramming back down to a normal state. Apparently, keeping your ego cranked up high works."

  Elin realized that her eyes were still closed; she opened them now and convulsively closed her hand around the edge of the metal cot. It was solid and real to the touch. Such a good feeling.

  "I'll be down in a minute," Tory said. "Just now, you need to rest." He touched a bone inductor, and Elin fell into blackness.

  Floating again, every metaphorical nerve on edge, Elin found herself hypersensitive to outside influences, preternatu-rally aware, even suggestible. Still, she suspected—more than sensed—Coral's presence. Go away, she thought. This is my mind now.

  I am here, and I am always. You have set foot in my country and are dimly aware of my presence. Later, when you have climbed into the mountains, you will truly know me; and then you will be as I.

  Everyone tells me what I'm going to do, Elin thought angrily. Don't I get any say?

  The thought that came to her was almost amused: You are only a program caught in a universal web of programming. You will do as your program dictates. To be free of the programs is to be God.

  Despite her anger, despite her hurt, despite the cold trickle of fear she tried to keep in the background, Elin was curious. What's it like? she couldn't help asking.

  It is golden freedom. The universe is a bubble infinitely large, and we who are God are the film on the bubble's outside. We interact and we program. We make the stars shine and the willows grow. We program what you will want far lunch. The programming flows through us, and we alter it and maintain the universe.

  Elin pounced on this last statement. Haven't done a very good job of it, have you?

  We do not tamper. When you are one with us, you will understand.

  This was, Elin realized, the kind of question-and-answer session Coral must have gone through repeatedly as part of the Star Maker project. She searched for a question that no one else would have asked, one that would be hers alone. And after some thought she found it.

  Do you still—personally—love Tory Shostokovich?

  At first there was a slight pause, then: The kind of love you mean is characteristic of lower-order programming. Not of program-free intelligence.

  A moment later Tory canceled all programming, and she floated to the surface, leaving God behind. But even before then she was acutely aware that she had not received a straight answer.

  "Elin, we've got to talk."

  She was patched into the outside monitors, staring across Mare Imbrium. It was a straight visual program; she could feel the wetwire leads dangling down her neck, the warm, humid air of Magritte against her skin. "Nothing to talk about," she said.

  "Dammit, yes there is! I'm not about to lose you again because of a misunderstanding, a—a matter of semantics."

  The thing about Outside was its airless clarity. Rocks and shadows were so preternaturally sharp. From a sensor or the crater's seaward slope, she stared off into Mare Imbrium; it was monotonous but in a comforting sort of way. A little like when she had made a Buddha. There was no meaning out there, nothing to impose itself between her and the surface.

  "I don't know how you found out about Coral," Tory said, "and I guess it doesn't matter. I always figured you'd find out sooner or later. That's not important. What matters is that I love you—"

  "Oh, hush up!"

  "—and that you love me. You can't pretend you don't."

  Elin felt her nails dig into her palms. "Sure I can," she said. She hopscotched down the crater to the surface. There the mass driver stood, a thin monorail stretching kilometers into the Imbrium, its gentle slope all but imperceptible.

  "You're identifying with the woman who used to be Elin Donnelly. There's nothing wrong with that; speaking as a wetsurgeon, it's a healthy sign. But it's something you've got to grow out of.''

  "Listen, Shostokovich, tinkering with my emotions doesn't change who I am. I'm not your dead lady friend, and I'm not about to take her place. So why don't you just go away and stop jerking me around, huh?"

  Tiny repair robots prowled the mass driver's length, stopping occasionally for a spotweld. Blue sparks sputtered soundlessly over the surface.

  "You're not the old Elin Donnelly either, and I think you know it. Bodies are transient, memories are nothing. Your spontaneity and grace, your quiet strength, your impatience— the small lacks and presences of you I've known and loved for years—are what make you yourself. The name doesn't matter, nor the past. You are who you are, and I love you for it."

  "Yeah, well, what I am does not love you, buster."

  One of the repairbots slowly fell off the driver. It hit, bounced, struggled to regain its treads, then scooted back toward its work.

  Tory's voice was almost regretful. "You do, though. You can't hide that from me. I know you as your lover and as your wetsurgeon. You've let me become a part of you, and no matter how angry you might temporarily be, you'll come back to me."

  Elin could feel her body trembling with rage. "Yeah, well if that's true, then why tell me! Hah? Why not just go back to your hut and wait for me to come crawling?"

  "Because I want you to quit your job." , "Say what?"

  "I don't want you to become God. It was a mistake the last time, and I'm afraid it won't be any better with the new programs. If you go up into God and can't get down this time, you'll do it the next time. And the next. I'll spend my life here waiting for you, re-creating you, losing you. Can't you see it—year after year, replaying the same tired old tape?" Tory's voice fell to a whisper. "I don't think I could take it even once more."

  "If you know me as well as you say, then I guess you know my answer," Elin said coldly.

  She waited until Tory's footsteps moved away, fading, defeat echoing after. Only then did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte's slope for the last five minutes.

  It was time for the final Trojan horse. "Today we make a god," Tory said. "This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three."

  One. The hell of it was that Tory was right. She still loved him. He was the one man she wanted and was empty without.

  Two. Worse, she didn't know how long she could go on without coming back to him—and, good God, would that be humiliating!

  She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one rather manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed, in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.

  Three. She opened her eyes.

  Nothing was any different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of God.

  "I don't think this is working," she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up, she found she was paralyzed.

  What is this maniac doing?

  Tory's face loomed over her, his eyes glassy, almost fearful. His hair was a tangled mess; her fingers itched with the impulse to run a comb through it.

  "Forgive me, love." He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the grass beside the cot.

  Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bone inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The programming began to flow into him.

  A long wait—perhaps
, twenty seconds viewed objectively— as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then—

  Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin struggled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued. He began thrashing wildly.

  Tory, Tory, what's happening to you?

  "It's just a grand mal seizure," Landis said. "Nothing we can't cope with, nothing we weren't prepared for." She touched Elin's shoulder reassuringly, called back to the crowd huddling about Tory, "Hey! One of you loopheads—somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this."

  A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others—still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene—were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped wildly. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased and his convulsions ceased.

  "There," the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the couch.

  She pushed through the people (and a small voice in the back of her head marveled: A crowd! How strange) and knelt before Tory, cradling his head ift her arms.

  He shivered, eyes wide and unblinking. "Tory, what's the matterV

  His terrible eyes turned on her. "Nichevo."

  "What?"

  "Nothing," Landis said. "Or maybe 'it doesn't matter' is a better translation."

  A wetware tech had taken control, shoving the crowd back. He reported to Landis, his mouth moving calmly under the interplay of green and red. "Looks like a flaw in the programming philosophy. We were guessing that bringing the ego along would make God such an unpleasant experience that the subject would let us deprogram, without interfering— now we know better."

  Elin stroked Tory's forehead. His muscles clenched, then loosened as a medtech reprogrammed the body responses. "Why isn't anyone doing anything?" she demanded.

  "Take a look," Landis said, and patched her into the intercom. In her mind's eye, Elin could see dozens of wetware techs submitting program after program. A branching wetware diagram filled one channel, and as she watched, minor changes would occur as programs took hold, then be unmade as Tory's mind rejected them. "We've got an imagery tap of his Weltanschauung coming up," some nameless tech reported.

  Something horrible appeared on a blank channel.

  Elin could take only an instant's exposure before her mind reflexively shut the channel down, but that instant was more than enough. She stood in a room infinitely large and cluttered with great, noisome machines.

  They were tended by malevolent demons who shrieked and cackled and were machines themselves, and they generated pain and madness.

  The disgust and revulsion she felt was absolute. It could not be put into words—no more than could the actual experience of what she had seen. And yet—she knew this much about wetware techniques—it was only a rough approximation, a cartoon, of what was going through Tory's head.

  Elin's body trembled with shock, and by slow degrees she realized that she had retreated to the surface world.

  Tory's head was still cradled in her arms. A wetware tech standing nearby looked stunned, her face gray.

  Elin gathered herself together, said as gently as she could, "Tory, what is that you're seeing?"

  Tory turned his stark, haunted eyes on her, and it took an effort of will not to flinch. Then he spoke, his words shockingly calm.

  "It is—what is. It's reality. The universe is a damned cold machine, and all of us only programs within it. We perform the actions we have no choice but to perform, and then we fade into nothingness. It's a cruel and noisy place."

  "I don't understand—didn't you always say that we were just programs? Wasn't that what you always believed?"

  "Yes, but now I experience it."

  Elin noticed that her hand was slowly stroking his hair; she did not try to stop it. "Then come down, Tory. Let them deprogram you."

  He did not look away. "Mcfcevo," he said.

  The tech, recovered from her shock, reached toward a piece of equipment. Landis battered her hand away. "Hold it right there, techie! Just what do you think you're doing?"

  The woman looked impatient. "He left instructions that if the experiment turned out badly, I was to pull the terminator switch."

  "That's what I thought. There'll be no mercy killings while I'm on the job, Mac."

  "I don't understand." The tech backed away, puzzled. "Surely you don't want him to suffer."

  Landis was gathering herself for a withering reply when the intercom cut them all off. A flash of red shot through the sensorium, along with the smell of bitter almond, a prickle of static electricity, the taste of kimchi. "Emergency! We've got an emergency!" A black and white face materialized in Elin's mind. "Emergency!"

  Landis flipped into the circuit. "What's the problem? Show us."

  "You're not going to believe this." The face disappeared and was replaced by a wide-angle shot of the lake.

  The greenish-black water was calm and stagnant. The thrust-cone island, with its scattered grass and weeds, slumbered.

  And God walked upon the water.

  They gawked, all of them. Coral walked across the lake, her pace determined but not hurried, her face serene. The pink soles of her bare feet just touched the surface.

  / didn't believe her, Elin thought wildly. She saw Father Landis begin to cross herself, her mouth hanging open, eyes wide in disbelief. Halfway through her gesture, the Jesuitical wet ware took hold. Her mouth snapped shut, and her face became cold and controlled. She pulled herself up straight.

  "Hans," the priest said, "push the button."

  "No!" Elin shrieked, but it was too late. Still hooked into the intercom, she saw the funny little man briskly, efficiently obey.

  For an instant, nothing happened. Then bright glints of light appeared at all of the condenser units, harsh and actinic. Steam and smoke gushed from the machinery, and a fraction of a second later, there was an ear-slapping gout of sound.

  Bits of the sky were blown away.

  Elin turned, twisted, fell. She scrambled across the ground and threw her arms around Tory.

  The air was in turmoil. The holes in the dome roof—small at first—grew as more of the dome flaked away, subjected to stresses it wasn't designed to take. An uncanny whistling grew to a screech, then a scream, and then there was an all-encompassing whoomph, and the dome shattered.

  Elin was flung upward, torn away from Tory, painfully flung high and away. All the crater was in motion, the rocks tearing out of the floor, the trees splintering upward, the lake exploding into steam.

  The screaming died—the air was gone. Elin's ears rang furiously, and her skin stung everywhere. Pressure grew within her, the desire of her blood to mate with the vacuum, and Elin realized that she was about to die.

  A quiet voice said: This must not be.

  Time stopped.

  Elin hung suspended between moon and death. The shards and fragments of an instant past crystallized and shifted. The world became not misty, exactly, but apositional. Both it and she grew tentative, possibilities rather than actual things.

  Come be God with me now, Coral said, but not to Elin.

  Tory's presence flooded the soupy uncertainty, a vast and powerful thing, but wrong somehow, twisted. But even as Elin felt this, there was a change within him, a sloughing off of identity, and he seemed to straighten, to heal.

  All around, the world began to grow more numinous, more real. Elin felt tugged in five directions at once. Tory's presence swelled briefly, then dwindled, became a spark, less than a spark, nothing.

  Yes.

  With a roaring of waters and a shattering of rocks, with an audible thump, the world returned.

  Elin unsteadily climbed down the last flight of stone stairs from the terraces to the lake-front. She passed by two guards at the foot of t
he stairs, their facepaint as hastily applied as their programming, several more on the way to the nearest trellis farm. They were everywhere since the incident.

  She found the ladder up into the farm and began climbing. It was biological night, and the agtechs were long gone.

  Hand over hand she climbed, as far and high as she could, until she was afraid she would miss a rung and tumble off. Then she swung herself onto a ledge, wedging herself between strawberry and yam planters. She looked down on the island, and though she was dizzyingly high, she was only a third of the way up.

  "Now what the hell am I doing here?" she mumbled to herself.

  She swung her legs back and forth, answered her own question: "Being a piss-ass drunk." She cackled. There was something she didn't have to share with Coral. She was capable of getting absolutely blitzed and walking away from the bar before it hit her. It was something metabolic.

  Below, Tory and Coral sat quietly on their monkey island. They did not touch, did not make love or hold hands or even glance at one another—they just sat. Being gods.

  Elin squinted down at the two. "Like to upchuck all over you," she mumbled. Then she squeezed her eyes and fists tight, drawing tears and pain. Dammit, Tory!

  Blinking hard, she looked away from the island, down into the jet-black waters of the lake. The brighter stars were reflected there. A slight breeze rippled the water, making them twinkle and blink, as if lodged in a Terran sky. They floated lightly on the surface, swarmed and coalesced, and formed Tory's face in the lake. He smiled warmly, invitingly.

  A hand closed around her arm, and she looked up into the stern face of a security guard. "You're drunk, Ms.," he said, "and you're endangering property."

  She looked where he pointed, at a young yam plant she had squashed when she sat down, and began to laugh. Smoothly, professionally, the guard rolled up her sleeve, clamped a plastic bracelet around her wrist. "Time to go," he said.

  By the time the guard had walked Elin up four terraces, she was nearly sober. A steady trickle of her blood wound through the bracelet, was returned to her body cleansed of alcohol. A sacrilegious waste of wine, in her opinion.