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

by Gardner Dozois

  “What’d you think?” I say. “You like the nervecast?”

  Oxford nods, almost reverently. “I crossed up Ash Limner,” he says.

  “That could be you in there, you know,” I say, tapping the pod. “People would be paying to be you in there.”

  Oxford gives the pod a look with just a bit of longing in it.

  “Everyone has a mesh,” I say. “Ash Limner is meshed. Dray Cardeno is meshed. Why not Oxford Diallo, huh?”

  Oxford chews his lip. “I promised,” he says.

  “To your grandfather?” I ask.

  He looks surprised. “Yes.”

  “But this mesh is different, Oxford,” I say. “We don’t call the shots. You call the shots. We’re just along for the ride.”

  Oxford frowns. “He said the mesh is a net you never get untangled from.”

  “You said you liked the nervecast,” I say. “That’s kind of hypocritical of you, don’t you think? You enjoying someone else’s nervecast when you won’t get a mesh for yourself?”

  “No,” Oxford says simply. “They chose.”

  “They chose, yeah, of course,” I say. “It’s always a choice. But they made the right choice. Man, you have a gift. Your dad said it himself. You have a gift from God.” I put my hand on the pod again. “You owe it to the world to make the most of that gift. I’m never going to know what it’s like to slam how you do. I could barely dirty-dunk back in high school. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of people are never going to know what it’s like. Unless you let us.”

  I can sense him wavering. He’s looking down at the pod, looking at his reflection in the shiny black mirror of it. I feel guilty in my gut, but I push right through, because this is important, getting this deal, and he’ll thank me later.

  “You owe it to us,” I say. “Your dad’s in the washroom. You know what he’s doing in there?”

  Oxford looks up, startled. Nods.

  “Hacking up blood,” I say. “He’s never going to run again. Not how he used to. You don’t think he’d like a chance to feel that again? To hit the break? To get out for that big dunk in transition, pound up the hardwood, slice right to the rack, drop the bomb like wham.” I clap my hands together and Oxford flinches a bit. “You owe it, man,” I say. “You owe it to your dad. He got you here, didn’t he? He got you all this way.”

  And that’s when Diallo senior comes out of the washroom, and I couldn’t have done it any better if I choreographed it myself, because he staggers a bit against the wall and looks suddenly old, suddenly tired. Oxford looks at him, looks scared as hell. Maybe realizing, for the first time, that his pa won’t be around forever.

  I reach as high as I can and put my hand on his shoulder. “You know the right call, yeah?”

  He hesitates, then slowly nods, and I want to bite off my tongue but I tell myself it’s worth it. Tell myself the both of them will thank me later.

  * * *

  Supper is quiet. Oxford is obviously still thinking about what I said, stealing odd glances over at his pa, and his pa is trying to figure out what’s going on without actually asking. It’s a relief for everyone, I think, when the oysters are finished and we head back outside.

  The Seattle sky’s gone dark and the air is a bit nippy. Oxford’s pa pulls on a pair of gloves while we wait for the autocab. When it pulls up, Oxford announces he’s not ready to head back to the hotel yet. He wants to shoot.

  “Yeah, alright,” I say. “Can head back to the gym. Got it rented for the whole day.”

  “No,” Oxford says. “Somewhere outside.”

  So we end up doing loops through the downtown until GPS finds an outdoor court at some Catholic school ten minutes away. There’s no one else there when we show up, and the court has one of those weird rubbery surfaces, but Oxford doesn’t seem to mind. He zips off his trackies and digs his ball out of his duffel.

  His pa keeps the gloves on to feed him shots, moving him around the arc, hitting him with nice crisp passes right in the shooting pocket. You can tell that this whole thing, this whole tableau, with him under the net and Oxford catching, shooting, catching, shooting, is something they’ve done a million times on a million nights. The bright white floodlights make them into long black silhouettes. Neither of them talk, but little puffs of steam come out of Oxford’s mouth as he moves.

  I watch from the chain-link fence, leaning back on it. Oxford’s form is still smooth levers and pistons, but when I get a glimpse of his face I can see he is not smiling how he smiled in the gym. I manage to lock eyes with him, and I give him a nod, then give him some privacy by walking down to the other end of the court. I hear him start talking to his pa in what my audio implant tells me is Serer.

  I’m thinking the contract is as good as signed, and I’m about to tell as much to my boss when I hear the ball slam into the chain-link fence, sending ripples all down the length. I turn to see Oxford’s pa shrugging off his orange jacket, face tight and livid mad. He looks right at me, the sort of look you give something stuck to the bottom of your bomb-as-fuck shoe, then turns to his son.

  “You think I cannot remember what it feels like to run?” he says. “You pity me?”

  Oxford shakes his head desperately, saying something in Serer again, but his pa is not listening.

  “We will play, then,” he says, and I get that he’s talking in English so I’ll understand. “You beat me, you can get the mesh surgery. Yes?”

  “I did not want…” Oxford trails off. He stares at me, confused, then at his pa, hurt.

  “It will be easy,” Diallo senior says. “I am old. I have bad lungs.” He scoops the ball off the pavement and fires it into Oxford’s chest. His son smothers it with his big hands but still has to take a step back, maybe more from the surprise than from the impact.

  Oxford puts it on the floor and reluctantly starts his dribble. “Okay,” he says, biting at his lips again. “Okay.”

  But he sleepwalks forward and his pa slaps the ball away, way quicker than I would have thought possible. Diallo senior bullies his son back into the post, hard dribble, fake to the right and then a short sharp jump hook up over his left shoulder. It’s in the net before Oxford can even leave his feet.

  They’re playing make it take it, or at least Oxford’s pa is. He gets the ball again and bangs right down to another post-up, putting an elbow into Oxford’s chest. Oxford stumbles. The same jump hook, machine precision, up and in. The cords swish.

  “I thought you want it now,” Diallo senior says. “I thought you want your mesh.”

  Oxford looks stricken, but he’s not looking over at me anymore. He’s zeroed in. The next time his pa goes for the hook, he’s ready for it, floating up like an astronaut and slapping the shot away hard. Diallo senior collects it in the shadows, brings it back, but the next time down on the block goes no better. Oxford pokes the ball away and dribbles it back to the arc, near enough to me that I can hear a sobbing whine in his throat. I remember that he’s really still a kid, all seven feet of him, and then he drills the three-pointer with his pa’s hand right in his face.

  And after that it’s an execution. It’s Oxford darting in again and again breathing short angry breaths, sometimes stopping and popping the pull-up jumper, sometimes yanking it all the way to the rack. He’s almost crying. I don’t know if they’re playing to sevens, or what, but I know the game is over when Oxford slips his pa on a spin and climbs up and under from the other side of the net, enough space to scoop in the finger roll nice and easy, but instead his arm seems to jack out another foot at least, impossibly long, and he slams it home hard enough that the backboard shivers. He comes down with a howl ripped out of his belly, and the landing almost bowls his pa over, sends him back staggering.

  Diallo senior gathers himself. Slow. He goes to pick up the ball, but suddenly his grimace turns to a cough and he doubles over. The rusty wracking sound is loud in the cold air and goes on forever. Oxford stands there frozen, panting how he never panted in the gym, staring at hi
s pa, and I stand there frozen staring at both of them. Then Diallo senior spits up blood in a ragged parabola on the sticky blue court, and his son breaks the frieze. He stumbles over, wraps his arms around him.

  A call from my boss blinks onto my retinal, accompanied by a sample from one of the latest blip-hop hits. It jangles back and forth across my vision while I stand there like a statue. Finally, I cancel the call and take a breath.

  “You don’t have to sign right away,” I say.

  Oxford and his pa both look up, remembering I’m there. I shouldn’t be.

  “You can think about it,” I stammer, ashamed like I’ve never been. “More. About the contract.”

  I want to tell them to forget the contract. Forget the mesh. We’ll make you famous without it. But instead I skulk away, out through the cold metal gate, leaving the Diallos huddled there under the floodlight, breathing a single cloud of steam.

  Emergence

  GWYNETH JONES

  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.

  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 Exhange, Dear Hill, 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. Her most recent books are a new SF novel, Spirit, or: 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.

  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 aserial-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 reunion 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 eyeblink. Apparently not. She’d left without a good-bye, 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, so I 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-honoured 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 hometown, and Outer Reaches’ major population centre, I often deal with Emergents. They account for practically all our petty offences, 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 offence 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 offence? 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 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 cancelled.

  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, a human kitchen. Arc, as a slender woman, bare-headed, dressed in silver-grey coveralls, watched us from her favourite 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 chili 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.”