The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Oh,” I said. And, “Did you…”

  “Yes, mum.”

  I thought about the flying woman, that moment of elements meeting, over the following days as Shahina introduced me, one by one, to her circle. Friends, colleagues, Colloquium fellows. Sergei her tall, polite amor. He was an archaeologist. I terrified him by existing. I wondered what Shahina had told him about me. They cooked for me. It was so special and touching. They had hired hob and utensils, plates and chopsticks. They had obviously rehearsed, their movements in the tiny kitchen area of the Colloquium apt—cramped even by Farside U standards—was as immaculately choreographed as a ballet.

  “Archaeology?”

  I saw a flicker of impatience, a twitch of irritation before Sergei answered me.

  “We’ve been living here for fifty years. It’s been a century since the first human landing, overs hundred years since the first probes hard-landed. That’s deep enough for archaeology.”

  “I get the same depth from studying history,” Shahina said and she rested her hand on Sergei’s. She was trying to softly intervene, to ameliorate, but I had no ill will to Sergei. I had neither ill will nor affection for him. He seemed a serious, flavourless boy, kind but dull. I could not understand what my daughter saw in him. I was neither surprised nor disappointed that it didn’t last. Nor was Shahina, I think.

  Shahina waited until I was on the platform, the train sliding in behind the glass pressure wall, before giving me the gift. It was small, the size of my thumb, but heavy, wrapped in indigo dashiki wave fabric through which I could feel sharp contours.

  “From Laplace F.”

  She met Sergei through small, treasured items like this. Aminata, a Colloquium-mate, had introduced Shahina to the Digs. No digging was involved. Archaeologists, historians, some extreme sports fans took off in sasuits, rovers, dust-bikes out across the Mares in search of old space hardware. Lunar landers, rovers, construction bots and solar sinterers from the early days of the settlement. Most prized was the dusty, dented detritus of the Apollos. They called this practical archaeology. I thought it bare-faced looting but I could not say so to Shahina. Sergei financed it. He was some minor Vorontsov. One of the Five Dragons. I was still not disappointed when Shahina dropped him.

  I turned the small precious thing over and over in my fingers.

  “What is it?”

  “History.”

  * * *

  Terminal velocity in a pressurised lunar habitat is sixty kilometres per hour.

  * * *

  Callisto dreams.

  E dreams in code, in shaped packets of electrons, as we all dream. All dreams are coded, and codes. AI dreams are not our dreams. Callisto dreams awake. E never sleeps, never needs to sleep. Callisto has difficulty understanding the human need for sleep, what it is, how we return from it the same as we entered; that we return from it at all. And Callisto dreams in er three separate manifestations: the mainframe, the probe, the blimp. I like to believe e shares dreams, like a family around the breakfast table in some café.

  If Callisto’s intelligence and emotions are genuine—some still believe they aren’t and I have argued and will argue again their error with them—then so are er dreams. Marid translates them into a form I can comprehend. Callisto’s dreaming is primarily auditory. Marid plays me a storming chatter of notes and clicks, titanic bass and infra bass swells and clusters of rushing triads at the very upper limit of my hearing. It sounds like chaos. It sounds like the throb of black holes, the drone of the cosmic microwave background, the slow tick of entropy towards dissolution and chaos but if you listen, if you really listen, if you go beyond the human instinct to analyse, to structure, the pareidolic need to see rabbits in the moon, faces on Mars, gods in the alignments of the stars, then a titanic music unfolds. Themes, harmonies—though by no harmonic laws we recognise—modes and variations, unfolding over a time-scale longer than any human attention span. It is magnificent and beautiful and quite the eeriest thing I have ever heard. I drop into the dream-music and when I return, reeling, hard-of-breath and dazed, hours have passed.

  I used to try to imagine what it must be like to dream constantly, to have this music rattling and burbling along the bottom of your consciousness like water over rocks. I understand now. The thing it must be like is imagination. That not-conscious but not-dreaming state of images, scenarios, illusions where we pursue potentials, alternatives, what-ifs. The imagination never closes, never quiets. It is the root of our humanity.

  * * *

  She got out of Aristarchus with three minutes of air to spare.

  I’m all right, she said. There’s nothing wrong, nothing to see. I came anyway, on the next express.

  Three minutes, three hundred minutes.

  But you could have died in there. How reluctantly I formed and spoke that word: died.

  She was, as she said, all right. As she said; if you didn’t die, you were untouched.

  I hadn’t heard from Shahina in three months. By heard from, I mean that in the old, Earthy sense—I hadn’t seen, visited; been voice-called by her. I read her updates. Her posts and pictures and comments. I circled her social world with slow wing-beats but I was not of it. I could have called but it was a principle.

  I must have read that she’d drifted away from the archaeologists, I must have seen the pictures of herself with her new friends, the explorers, leaning against each other, making gestures with their hands, pouting and posing and laughing. Urbanisme: I know that word, but I can only have learned it from Shahina’s posts. I was working in a contract with Taiyang developing the interface for their new system of three AIs for Whitacre Goddard Bank; the ones—the legends said—that would be able to predict the future. The Suns expect work for their money; I remember long hard hours at the desk, digging deep, building layers, dripping emotions from algorithms like botanicals in custom gin. There is no more tiring work than emotion work. I must have read Shahina’s posts in a blur of exhaustion, taken them in at some level beneath analytic consciousness. I remember excitement. New friends, new group identity, new sport. Sport it was. Archaeology pretended to intellectual merit; urbanisme was adventure.

  Her first exploration was to the old Mackenzie Metals habitat at Crisium, long abandoned since the Mackenzies moved their operations base to Crucible, the furnace-train that constantly circles the moon, maintaining eternal noon sun on its smelter-mirrors. By train then rover to Crisium, into sasuits and down into the abandoned tunnels. Afterwards, I watched all her videos. Headlamp beams lancing out through the passageways. Dust kicked up by booted feet. Lamps lighting up rooms and chambers and the mumble of audio commentary; we think this a mess hall; according to the maps, this is the old board room. Desks, furniture, graffiti. Screens, from the days before information was beamed on to the eyeball. Nothing organic: even then the Lunar Development Corporation’s zaballeens recycled all carbon ferociously. Beams of light shooting upwards, bouncing from the walls of an old agriculture shaft, reflecting from the mirror array that once conveyed sunlight down to the stacks of aeroponics racks. Ovals of light overlapping on the gentle up-ramp of the main outlock. I watched with my heart in my throat, my hands to my mouth. I saw a thousand mistakes, ten thousand accidents, any of which could jam a valve, smash a helmet, gash a sasuit open. The moon has a thousand ways to kill you: every moon-child is taught that, the same hour that the chib is bonded to the eyeball and forever after you owe for the air you breath, the water you drink, the carbon you consume, the data you process. I don’t believe I drew breath until I saw the final image: the team shot beside the rover; faceless helmets inclined towards each other, sasuits smudged with dark moondust. Body shapes beneath the close-fitting suits, the appended name tags over the left shoulders were the only clues. Shahina was between two young men, her arms around their shoulders. I would have recognised her without the tag. Sunlight spangled from her helmet visor. I knew she was grinning.

  Her second expedition was to Orientale. I studied there when I first c
ame to the moon. In those tunnels I worked and loved. In one of those small cabins I passed my Moonday, alone, knees pulled to my chest, hiding from all the friends and colleagues who wanted to take me out and splash my head with industrial vodka and proclaim me a true daughter in the moon. Alone and weeping I rocked, terrified that I had made the wrong decision, knowing that it was now impossible to undo it. I could never go back to Earth again. My bones would sag and snap, my lungs fail, my heart flutter under a gravity my body had forgotten. I watched her stalk through the airless corridors, narrower than I remember; shine her light into the cubicles and labs, tighter than I remember. It seemed five minutes since I had lived there, yet I couldn’t believe that I—that anyone—had lived there. I don’t know what I would gave done if her weaving beam had caught some discarded part of my past—vacuum-dried shorts, a glass, a cosmetics sachet. Ghosts of myself. It would have been equally strange for Shahina, I suppose: evidence of a time before she existed. If she could even recognise that debris as mine. I was glad when the video cut to the team hug at the end.

  On her third expedition, the roof came in. Opening shot: Shahina and their friends at the station, the express pulling in behind them. They’ve printed matching tank-tops: Urbanisme: Aristarchus. Train, then three hours by rover to the ruins at Aristarchus. Two hundred people died when a deep quake—the rarest and most dangerous of the many seisms that shake the Moon—popped the Corta Hélio maintenance base like a bubble. I watched this afterwards, understand. I still wanted to take the next train to Meridian and snatch my daughter up and whisk her away with me, safe, secure. If I had seen this as live feed, I would have spent every last bitsie on a Vorontsov moonship and still gone into debt for a century to haul her out.

  Corta Hélio never brought the bodies back from Aristarchus. Too dangerous.

  They had maps, AI guidance, satellite tracking, they knew that dead site like they knew their own skins; they went in safe, sane and prepared but they still weren’t expecting the temblor that brought down their main access tunnel. Half a kilometre of highly fragmented KREEP between them and the surface. They used their wit, they used their skill, they used their fit smart bodies. There was an old conduit shaft that carried power and coms from the surface to the habitat. It was five hundred metres, a vertical climb, through tangled cabling and smashed struts sharp as spears, camera, handholds, world shaking to the aftershocks. Shahina kept the camera running throughout. I knew the outcome but I watched with my hands over my mouth.

  She made it to the rover with three minutes oxygen to spare. They all made it.

  Three minutes, three hundred minutes, she said. To weaken my position, she brought two fellow Urbanistes to meet me. They were tall and languorous and moved beautifully. I felt small, I felt old, I felt obsolete. I felt awed by my daughter. She seemed a different species from me.

  She messaged me privately on the train, familiar to familiar. She was getting out of urbanisme anyway. The boys were too up their own asses. The climb out of the dead habitat had taught her something about herself: she could move. Her body was strong and accurate. She liked to move. She had learned to love her physicality.

  She was taking up parcour.

  * * *

  Why should a space probe have emotions? Why would e even need such things? In the early days of exploration, probes were no smarter than insects and they opened up whole new worlds inside the world we thought we knew. No smarter, and with even less emotional freight. They trundled, cold and heartless, across the hillsides of Mars, swung soulless and free from wonder over the methane seas of Titan.

  My first answer is, why should an Artificial Intelligence not have emotions? But that is really not an answer, just a rhetorical device, so I follow it with this: since the 2076 Bamako Agreement, it is the right of every Artificial Intelligence to perceive and enjoy specific internal states which are analogous to emotions in human beings. To which you say: this is the Moon. No one has any rights. No rights, no civil law, only contracts between parties.

  My second answer is: this exploration is part financed by subscription to live feeds, from within the atmosphere of Saturn. The old national space administrations learned their images from the surface of Mars were much better received when spiced with emotionality, even if that was added by a social media agent on Earth. Humans love emotionality. Make us feel something; then we understand. Give us the tiniest empathy with what it feels like to drive into the unimaginable wind-shear of Hexagon, the north polar vortex. What it is to be … The essential human question.

  And I’ll have my third answer ready before your riposte: what is exploration? It is curiosity, the desire to know what is beyond those clouds; over that horizon. It is courage and caution, it is excitement and fear; it is the tension between risk and the desire for knowledge. A probe that knows emotions—its analogues of those emotions, for how can we ever really know what’s in the head of an other, be that bone or plastic—is better able to explore, to risk, to be cautious, to assess risk: to dare.

  But it’s my last answer that’s in the end my first and only answer. Emotions are the nature of space probes, of express trains, of helium three extractors and solar sinterers, of the orbital transfer tethers wheeling around the waist of our world. Emotions are an emergent property. You can no more make an artificial intelligence without emotions than you can a baby without tears, a daughter without curiosity. Why should an artificial intelligence have emotions, you asked? And I said, why not? But both of those are wrong. It’s not a why question, or a because answer. Emotions are part of the universe.

  * * *

  She went up the side of Gargarin Prospekt in such great bounds, so fast, so agile I thought for a moment she was flying. From the park bench to the top of the print-shop, print-shop roof to ventilator pipe. Two heart-beats and she was crouching on the handrail of West 3rd, toes and fingers curled in their gloves, grinning down at me a dozen meters below. She had cut her hair to a bob so as not to interfere with her running but Egyptian curls are not vanquished so easily. They fell around her face, lively and bobbing in lunar gravity. Then a shake and she sprang up again, outstretched, flying, one jump taking her to within reach of a lighting stanchion. She stretched, reached, grabbed, swung, somersaulted away to rebound from a balustrade onto the veranda of an apartment two levels higher. She stood like a little god, hands on hips. She looked up. The ten thousand lights of Orion Quadra shone above her, and higher than all of them, the sun-line fading towards night.

  She grabbed a corner of a roof truss, ran up the wall and launched herself towards those higher lights.

  And her pack mates, her follow traceurs flew with her. Like liquid, like animals, so fast and sleek and beautiful I found it almost alien. Human beings could not perform such wonders.

  The invitation had been for the Colloquium Cotillion—its annual graduation when family and dearest of all Colloquium members are invited to a reception and dinner—but Shahina wanted me to see her run. It was all she talked of at the restaurant; moves and holds, stunts and technical wear, customised grip soles and whether it was more authentic to free run without Familiar assistance. I understood one word in five but I saw the dark energy, the constrained passion, and I though I had never seen her so young or so beautiful.

  Of course I went to the run. I was the only parent. These young people, as tall and beautiful as any, didn’t seem haughty or disdainful to me. These wiry, athletic boys, these dark-skinned muscular girls, restless and pacing or still and haunting, intensely focused on world, their sport, their challenge. I was as invisible as a ghost, but, as the legends say, there are no ghosts on the moon. Shahina, wire-thin but stronger than I had ever seen her before, in tights and the cropped, baggy T-shirt that was the fashion that season, foot and hand gloves, intent in conversation with two fellow traceurs. I could clearly see that they adored her. Traceur, that word, it was important, Shahina impressed on me. A name, an identity, a tribe. She had been free-running for six months now.

  This was t
he pack’s greatest challenge yet. All the way to the top of Orion Quadra, to touch the sun-line, three kilometres up.

  I saw her leap. My heart stopped as she flew out over the drop to bustling Gargarin Prospekt. She flew far, she flew true, she snatched a cable on a cross-quadra bridge and, a hundred metres above the ground, swung herself on to the crosswalk. She ran along the balustrade, balanced perfectly, as her traceurs swung up from beneath the bridge, dropping into position around her like an honour guard. Pedestrians, runners, strollers, worker going on-shift stared in amazement and I, craning my neck and ordering Marid to up the magnification on my lens, thought: don’t you wish you were as hot and beautiful and sheerly magnificent as my daughter? Amazement and no small envy.

  Up she flew, a blur of motion and speed, the pack racing with her but Shahina always a foot, a hand, a finger ahead of them. Marid focused, refocused, focused again, tighter and tighter as she climbed higher and higher. The race was as much horizontal as vertical: this was not climbing, Shahina had carefully lectured me at the banquet. This was parcour, and she ran ledges, over-handed along cables and danced on railings to find the best route up to the next level. Upward and upward. It was beautiful to watch. I had never been so afraid; I had never been so exhilarated.

  Marid zoomed out for a moment to show me the true scale of the adventure and I gasped; the traceurs were flecks of movement on the towering walls of the world; brief absences in the patterns of light. Insects. Shahina has never known insects. My familiar lensed in again. They were above the inhabited levels now, even the mean shanties of the Bairro Alto where the up-and-out of Meridian society retreat: the old industrial and service levels, the first diggings from which Meridian grew downward, delving three kilometres deep. Here was the traceurs’ playground; a world of handholds and surfaces and levels. A giant climbing frame. The race was on. I could not see Shahina’s face when one of the boys passed her but I knew the expression that would be on it. I had seen those narrowed eyes, lips; that set of the jaw so many times in childhood and adolescence.