Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space

by Jack Dann

  And there was my brown-eyed body at the head of the table, looking down at the members of the Cadre of Glorious Destiny who were toasting me with tropical drinks, the kind that have parasols in them.

  Tears came to my eyes, and they were a lot wetter and hotter than tears in the sims. For some reason that fact made me cry even more.

  My parents came to the dinner, because this was the first time they could actually hug me—hug me for real, that is, and not in a sim. They had downloaded into bodies that didn’t look much like the four-armed quadbods they used back on Ceres, but that didn’t matter. When my arms went around them, I began to cry again.

  After the tears were wiped away we put on underwater gear and went for a swim on the reef, which is just amazing. More colors and shapes and textures than I could ever imagine—or imagine putting in a work of art.

  A work of art that embodies all but selects none is not art, but mere cant and recitation.

  Oh, wow. You’re right. Thank you, Dr. Sam.

  After the reef trip we paid a visit to one of the underwater settlements, one inhabited by people adapted to breathe water. The problems were was that we had to keep our underwater gear on, and that none of us were any good at the fluid sign language they all used as their preferred means of communication.

  Then we rose from the ocean, dried out, and had a last round of hugs before being uploaded to our normal habitations. I gave Janis a particularly strong hug, and I whispered in her ear.

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Who?” she grinned. “Me?”

  And then the little brown-haired body was left behind, looking very lonely, as everyone else put on the electrodes and uploaded back to their normal and very distant worlds.

  As soon as I arrived on Ceres, I zapped an avatar of myself into my parents’ quarters. They looked at me as if I were a ghost.

  “What are you doing here?” my mother managed.

  “I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but I think you’re going to have to hire a lawyer.”

  It was surprisingly easy to do, really. Remember that I was assisting Dane, who was a communications tech, and in charge of uploading all of our little artificial brains to Earth. And also remember that I am a specialist in systems interoperability, which implies that I am also a specialist in systems interoperability.

  It was very easy to set a couple of artificial intelligences running amok in Dane’s system just as he was working on our upload. And that so distracted him that he said yes when I said that I’d do the job for him.

  And once I had access', it was the work of a moment to swap a couple of serial numbers.

  The end result of which was that it was Janis who uploaded into my brown-haired body, and received all the toasts, and who hugged my parents with my arms. And who is now on Earth, incarnated, with a full set of human rights and safe from Anna-Lee.

  I wish I could say the same for myself.

  Anna-Lee couldn’t have me killed, of course, since I don’t belong to her. But she could sue my parents, who from her point of view permitted a piece of software belonging to them to prevent her from wreaking vengeance on some software that belonged to her.

  And of course Anna-Lee went berserk the second she found out—which was more or less immediately, since Janis sent her a little radio taunt as soon as she downed her fourth or fifth celebratory umbrella drink.

  Janis sent me a message, too.

  “The least you could have done was make my hair red.”

  My hair. Sometimes I wonder why I bothered.

  An unexpected side effect of this was that we all got famous. It turns out that this was an unprecedented legal situation, with lots of human interest and a colorful cast of characters. Janis became a media celebrity, and so did I, and so did Anna-Lee.

  Celebrity didn’t do Anna-Lee’s cause any good. Her whole mental outlook was too rigid to stand the kind of scrutiny and questioning that any public figure has to put up with. As soon as she was challenged she lost control. She called one of the leading media interviewers a name that you, Dr. Sam, would not wish me to repeat.

  Whatever the actual merits of her legal case, the sight of Anna-Lee screaming that I had deprived her of the inalienable right to kill her daughter failed to win her a lot of friends. Eventually the Five Principles people realized she wasn’t doing their cause any good, and she was replaced by a Movement spokesperson who said as little as possible.

  Janis did some talking, too, but not nearly as much as she would have liked, because she was under house arrest for coming to Earth without a visa and without paying the immigration tax. The cops showed up when she was sleeping off her hangover from all the umbrella drinks. It’s probably lucky that she wasn’t given the opportunity to talk much, because if she started on her rants she would have worn out her celebrity as quickly as Anna-Lee did.

  Janis was scheduled to be deported back to Ceres, but shipping an actual incarnated human being is much more difficult than zapping a simulation by laser, and she had to wait for a ship that could carry passengers, and that would be months.

  She offered to navigate the ship herself, since she had the training, but the offer was declined.

  Lots of people read her thesis who wouldn’t otherwise have heard of it. And millions discussed it whether they’d read it or not. There were those who said that Janis was right, and those that said that Janis was mostly right but that she exaggerated. There were those who said that the problem didn’t really exist, except in the statistics.

  There were those who thought the problem existed entirely in the software, that the system would work if the simulations were only made more like reality. I had to disagree, because I think the simulations were like reality, but only for certain people.

  The problem is that human beings perceive reality in slightly different ways, even if they happen to be programs. A programmer could do his best to create an artificial reality that exactly mimicked the way he perceived reality, except that it wouldn’t be as exact for another person, it would only be an approximation. It would be like fitting everyone’s hand into the same-sized glove.

  Eventually someone at the University of Adelaide read it and offered Janis a professorship in their sociology department. She accepted and was freed from house arrest.

  Poor Australia, I thought.

  I was on video quite a lot. I used my little-girl avatar, and I batted my big eyes a lot. I still wore blue, mourning for Fritz.

  Why, I was asked, did ‘I act to save Janis?

  “Because we’re cadre, and we’re supposed to look after one another.”

  What did I think of Anna-Lee?

  “I don’t see why she’s complaining. I’ve seen to it that Janis just isn’t her problem any more.’'’

  Wasn’t what I did stealing?

  “It’s not stealing to free a slave.”

  And so on. It was the same sort of routine I’d been practicing on my parents all these years, and the practice paid off. Entire cadres—hundreds of them—signed petitions asking that the case be dismissed. Lots of adults did the same.

  I hope that it helps, but the judge that hears the case isn’t supposed to be swayed by public opinion, but only by the law.

  And everyone forgets that it’s my parents who will be on trial, not me, accused of letting their software steal Anna-Lee’s software. And of course I, and therefore they, am completely guilty, so my parents are almost certainly going to be fined, and lose both money and Citizenship Points.

  I’m sorry about that, but my parents seem not to be.

  How the judge will put a value on a piece of stolen software that its owner fully intended to destroy is going to make an interesting ruling, however it turns out.

  I don’t know whether I’ll ever set foot on Earth again. I can’t take my place in Pisa because I’m not incarnated, and I don’t know if they’ll offer again.

  And however things turn out, Fritz is still zeroed. And I still wear blue.

  I don’
t have my outside job any longer. Dane won’t speak to me, because his supervisor reprimanded him, and he’s under suspicion for being my accomplice. And even those who are sympathetic to me aren’t about to let me loose with their computers.

  And even if I get a job somewhere, I can’t be incarnated until the court case is over.

  It seems to me that the only person who got away scot-free was Janis. Which is normal.

  So right now my chief problem is boredom. I spent fourteen years in a rigid program intended to fill my hours with wholesome and intellectually useful activity, and now that’s over.

  And I can’t get properly started on the non-wholesome thing until I get an incarnation somewhere.

  Everyone is, or hopes to be, an idler.

  Thank you, Dr. Sam.

  I’m choosing to idle away my time making pictures. Maybe I can sell them and help pay the Earth tax.

  I call them my “Dr. Johnson” series. Sam. Johnson on Mars. Sam. Johnson Visits Neptune. Sam. Johnson Quizzing the Tomasko Glacier. Sam. Johnson Among the Asteroids.

  I have many more ideas along this line.

  Dr. Sam, I trust you will approve.

  COMBAT SHOPPING

  Elizabeth Moon

  * * *

  Going shopping at the mall can be an adventure even for today's teenagers—when you live amidst the icy wastes of the frozen moon Ganymede, however, the stakes can be a whole lot higher.. .

  Elizabeth Moon has degrees in history and biology and served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Her novels include Sheepfarmer's Daughter, Divided Allegiance, Oath of Gold, Sassinak and Generation Warriors (written with Anne McCaffrey), Surrender None, Liar's Oath, Planet Pirates (with Jody Lynn Nye and Anne McCaffery), Hunting Party, Sporting Chance, Winning Colors, Once a Hero, Rules of Engagement, Change of Command, Against the Odds, Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, and Remnant Population. Her short fiction has been collected in Lunar Activity and Phases, and she has edited the anthologies Military SF 1 and Military SF 2. Her novel The Speed of Dark won a Nebula Award in 2004. Her most recent book is a new novel, Engaging the Enemy.

  * * *

  ANDI MURCHISON HEARD Mama call the first time, but she paid no attention. Mama always called four or five times and as long as she didn’t wait until Mama’s voice got that sort of squeak to it, nothing bad would happen. She had better things to do than come running when Mama called, anyway. This was the last chance she had to talk over tomorrow’s plans with her friends at Base, friends she hadn’t seen for five hundred boring days, the only friends she had.

  On that day—the best day of her life so far—Mama had signed her up with a recreation group at Base Children’s Park after her check-up at Base Clinic, and the recreation director had introduced her to a group of girls who came three days a week. She’d been a little daunted at first—they were all taller than she was—but they’d shown her how to play with the equipment, and soon she’d been shrieking and laughing with the rest. She’d been the first independent habitateur the others had ever met; they’d been the first Base children she’d seen since her trip out, when Mama and Pop had picked her up at the Creche.

  Beth had been the first to find her on comm; since then Andi had talked to Beth or Vinnie almost every day even though Mama complained that her “chattering” had cost too much. Andi didn’t care. It wasn’t her fault she was there, and not someplace better; she hadn’t asked to become a habitateur’s adopted child, any more than the others had. She didn’t care that only those two had stayed in contact, either. They told her all about the others, so she felt she still knew Terry, Hamilton, Lisa, Maddy, and even girls new to Base.

  Tomorrow she would be back with them, back where she was sure she belonged. She would have five days there—some of it boring enough, following Mama around, but she’d been promised some time to spend with them. Combat shopping, Vinnie and Beth called it, when they had to find as much as they could in a hurry while spending as little as possible. She was still too young to stay at Base alone, but someday she’d be able to escape this—she looked around at the boring, too-familiar interior of the habitat.

  “Andi! Now!” Mama’s voice had taken on that dangerous edge. “Get off the comm, blast you!”

  “Got to go. Parent trouble.” She tapped that in and cleared the comm, not that anyone really needed it now. If only she lived on Earth, or MarZone, where everyone had personal communicators and a network of satellites meant anyone could talk to anyone. Here on Ganymede, as well as being stuck under a layer of ice in a closed habitat with nowhere to go and nothing to see, Jupiter’s electromagnetic activity made such easy communications impossible.

  When she came into the habitat’s main living space, Mama was hunched over the comm herself. That was a surprise; Mama mostly left the comm to Pop. The younger children—Gerry, Bird, and Damon—were already at the table, spooning up the same boring reconstituted slop that was all they had left in the last weeks before a trip to Base.

  “Hurry up and eat,” Mama said, without looking up. “You need to get the others packed.”

  Andi put a spoonful of the stuff—beige and lumpy and slightly gooey—into her bowl and tasted it. Bland. Boring. Then the meaning of Mama’s words made it through her boredom.

  “Others packed? What do you mean?” For one moment of blinding joy she imagined the others being sent away: Gerry the loud and exuberant, Bird the restless and fidgety, Damon with his inexplicable blank periods. But that couldn’t be it; Mama and Pop would lose their subsidies.

  Bird turned to her, face alight. “We’re going to Base,” she said softly. “Mama said so.”

  Andi’s stomach clenched. “You’re all going? There’s not enough room—”

  “It’s Damon,” Gerry said. “Mama’s taking him to the Clinic at Base to see if they can fix him.”

  Andi glanced sideways at Damon, who was staring into his bowl, his spoon hovering above it. It was always hard to know if Damon noticed what anyone said. His blank periods came oftener now; he was falling behind in schoolwork, and he couldn’t do even the simplest chores without supervision.

  “Damon, eat your supper,” she said. His spoon moved slowly, slowly, toward the bowl and stopped again. “Damon, spoon in—” she said. Then “Lift spoon” and “Eat it up!” Another bite went in his mouth.

  “Andi, I said get them packed!” Mama said, sounding even more annoyed. “Gerry, you can get Damon fed. Bird, clean up.”

  Andi hastily gobbled the last few bites of supper and handed her bowl to Bird. “How many nights?” she asked Mama. “Two or three,” Mama said, still staring at the comm screen. She tapped in something. “One each way traveling, one there, if we’re unlucky. We’ll stay on the shuttle; it costs too much to rent a room.”

  “But we were going to stay a week,” Andi said. “You said—”

  “I know what I said,” Mama said, turning now to glare at her. “That’s changed now. Damon needs a complete workup; he had another seizure this afternoon. That can’t go on. If he can’t work—” She left that unfinished. “We can’t afford to waste the time or money just for you to have a joyride.”

  “It’s not just a joyride,” Andi said. “It’s my exam—Pop said I could take the Class C exam—he wants me to take the Class C exam. And if I pass—when I pass—you said I could get some new clothes—I’ve been saving—”

  “Jim wants a lot of things,” Mama said, her mouth tightening to a hard line that spit the words out like stones. “We all want a lot of things we aren’t going to get.”

  “But—I can still take the exam—” Even if she didn’t get the new clothes, even if she didn’t have a couple of days to shop and visit her friends, she could have that.

  “It really doesn’t matter if you take it now or the next trip,” Mama said, turning back to the screen. “You’re barely old enough to qualify. I need you to take care of Gerry and Bird while Damon and I are at the Clinic.”

  The next trip could be five hundred more days away, an impossib
le wait. Andi glanced at the table. Gerry, coaching Damon to eat, gave her a triumphant look of pure wickedness. She could just see trying to control Gerry—the way he’d shot up in the past few hundred days. Sure, he was younger, but he was smart and mischievous, and now he was taller than she was.

  “They have child-minding services at Base,” Andi said. “Last time, when I was there, remember? You put me in a recreation group—”

  “It costs money!” Mama said. “We don’t have money to waste on that when you’re available.”

  Available. That’s what she always was, right there handy, Handy-Andi as Gerry put it so nastily. Available, useful, labor-saving: that’s what she was, and all she was, as far as Mama was concerned. Andi stalked off to the boys’ dorm, the single space Gerry shared with Damon and Oscar, their older “brother.” Mama and Pop insisted they call each other brother and sister, but none of them were gene-sibs. Like all the habitateurs’ children, they were adoptees, children no one wanted back on Earth or the inner colonies. Like the orphans once shipped out to farms in the North American pioneer days.

  Andi pulled a duffel out of the storage locker and stuffed it with Damon’s pajamas, Damon’s spare jumpsuit, Damon’s underwear, and two packets of Damon’s pajama liners. He still wet himself most nights. She put in Damon’s night toy, a stuffed lamb with the fleece worn almost off, and his favorite pillow. Both smelled of Damon, but he liked it that way. Gerry’s duffel was easier—his underwear, his pajamas, his spare jumpsuit. She hesitated over his toolkit. Mama would say to leave it behind; Gerry plus a toolkit, any kind of toolkit, was asking for trouble. And the shuttle had its own set of tools. Still ... it might keep him more cooperative, if she included it. She stuffed it into the roll of his underwear. Toiletries: the shuttle had waterless soap, but they’d need toothbrushes, combs . . .

  She brought both duffels out to the main room, just as Pop and Oscar came in from the day’s work. Gerry was still working with Damon.