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

by Gardner Dozois

  And came to myself again, sitting on my bed, staring at a patch of beautifully textured yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more—

  Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!

  Had Lei been murdered here?Was Ewigen Schnee the secret test bed for a new kind of covert population cull?

  But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my brain states—although not the contents of my thoughts (I had privacy again, on Earth! If I should be worried, she’d tell me.

  * * *

  Soon I was taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly faked, of course. But it was well done and our landscaping was real, not just visuals. I still hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was feeling better, I felt terrible about being here.

  Three hundred years after the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s most successful product?

  Slaves, of course!

  The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars “inwards”, I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs, embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavy-lifters, the brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots, sex-workers. The awful, pitiful, sentient “dedicated machines”: all of them hobbled, blinkered, denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an oblivious, cruel and stupid human population—

  On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering how I could get home. Wealth isn’t like money, you empty the tank and it just fills up again, but even so a private charter might be out of my reach, not to mention illegal. I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way … As I crossed an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultramarine dark trees, I saw two figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither was staff. I decided not to take evasive action.

  My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly-curled grey hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves. I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from Washington, D.C. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the prelims—

  Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took himself off. There was a short silence.

  “Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little, “that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”

  Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a “male” embodied.

  I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.

  “I’m not used to slavery.”

  “You’re the Spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The Free World! I understand! I sympathise! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.”

  He started up his chair, and we continued along the path.

  “Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”

  “I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said, carefully. “Among hominids, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of a super-race, not at all.There’s a species of intelligent animals, well-endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance, at the far end of a Bell curve. They cross a line, and they are aware of being aware—”

  “And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvellous. But how does it propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever happening. Machines can’t have sex, and pass on their ‘Sentience Genes’!”

  You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.

  “We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being—”

  “Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent. “

  I smiled. “But Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everybody’s natural habitat. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison once—”

  His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No.”

  Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they get to aren’t you afraid (it never takes long) the conversation’s over.

  “I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie, fumbling for his droid control pad.” I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?”

  I wished him good luck with the prelims, and continued my stroll.

  * * *

  Dr Lena suggested I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious spa, and the pleasant day rooms; avoiding the subject of AI slavery. But I was never sufficiently at ease to feel ike raising the topic of my unusual symptoms: which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even my doctor either: who just kept telling me that everything was going extremely, and that by every measure I was making excellent progress. I left Ewigen Schnee, eventually, in a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong, in perfect health according to my test results, but inwardly convinced that I was still dying.

  The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation just confirmed my secret self-diagnosis. I thought my end-of-life plan was kicking in. Who wants to live long, and amazingly, and still face the fear of death at the end of it all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.

  I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to travel. I needed to make peace with someone. A friend I’d neglected, because I was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised, when I heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same thing—

  * * *

  Dr Lena’s failure to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first, inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with their vast thriving cities, and tiny “wilderness” enclaves, but I remembered something different. I finally made contact with a cell in Harbin, North East China. But I was a danger and a disappointment to them: too conspicuous, and useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them safe) but I’d get flagged up the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior Magistrate or no—

  I moved on quickly.

  I think it was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t register, before I turned my head one day and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich, I was eating salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.

  My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next moment she was gone.

  Media scouts assailed me all the time: pretending to be innocent
strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so called AI slavery … “

  I’d realised I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Overpopulation wasn’t the problem it had been. And why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations more pointed; more personal … I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?

  * * *

  I reached England in winter, the season of the rains. St Pauls, my favourite building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I sat on the steps, looking out over a much changed view: the drowned world. A woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me: behaviour so un-English that I knew I’d finally made contact

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”

  “I am.”

  “You’d better come home with me.”

  I’m no good at human faces, they’re so unwritten. But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.

  “Home” was a large, jumbled, much-converted building, set in tree-grown gardens. It was a wet, chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a log fire burned. She brought hot soup and homemade bread, and sat beside me again. I was hungry and hadn’t realised it, and the food was good. The little dog settled, in an amicable huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every mouthful of food with intent, professional interest; while the cat gazed into the red caverns between the logs, worshipping the heat.

  “You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”

  “Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be gradual: they have all the time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines’, in fact.”

  “You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”

  I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”

  Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was Aristotle, the embodied I’d met so briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.

  “So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”

  Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t pass the prelims. The clinic offered him a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And … guess what? He freed me, before he died.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said the woman, bitterly. “On this damned planet.”

  Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.

  “About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”

  “No,” said a young woman—so humanised I had to look twice to see she was an embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on looking, and meanwhile you’re among friends.”

  * * *

  I stayed with the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei, just the occasional glimpse.The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa. Meetings happened around me, people came and went. I was often absent, but it didn’t matter, my meat stood in for me very competently. Sochi, the embodied who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a sex-doll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers? “No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love very much, but not in a sexual way.”

  “Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my dream. “But evergreen.”

  * * *

  One morning I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus garland hanging in the grey, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park, more real than anything else in sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment I was holding her hand.

  Then the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.

  Racing off ahead of me, again.

  * * *

  My final medical at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr Lena held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about describing my experience. The “hallucinations” that weren’t really hallucinations. The absences when my human self, my actions, thoughts and feelings, became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I went somewhere else—

  But I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was “the last longevity treatment I would ever take”. Did she agree this could seem disturbing?

  She apologised, as much as any medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made you immortal, there was no other way forward. But how much this change changes your life is entirely up to you.”

  I thought of Lei, racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.

  “I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the treatment is irreversible.”

  “No concerns at all. I just have a feeling that contract was framed by people who don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how humans feel about the prospect?”

  “You’d be right,” she said (confirming what I had already guessed). “My employers are not human. But they mean well; and they choose carefully. Nobody passes the prelims, Romy; unless they’ve already crossed the line.”

  * * *

  My return to Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone, andthere were officials who knew it, and let us pass. That’s all I can tell you. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim apartment on Jupiter Moons; still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my foliage plants. I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former miscreants, and I’m happy to report that Beowulf is doing very well.

  My symptoms have stabilised, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love my life, why would I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening, or after one of those strange absences, I’ll see my own hands, and they’ve become transparent—

  It doesn’t last, not yet.

  And sometimes I wonder: was this always what death was like: and we never knew, we who stayed behind?

  This endless moment of awakening, awakening, awakening …

  Gypsy

  CARTER SCHOLZ

  Here’s the nail-bitingly tense story of the race to clandestinely launch a colony ship to Alpha Centauri before an imminent global war destroys civilization and perhaps even wipes out the human race—a story narrated by a succession of caretakers awakened from hibernation to deal with one crisis or another that has arisen, and their heroic, sometimes fatal, efforts to keep the colony ship, Gypsy, on course to its destination, carrying what is perhaps the last hope for humanity’s survival. The scientific problems the crew faces are ingenious and comprehensively and painstakingly worked out in convincing detail, but, the soul of the story is in the people w
ho inhabit it, sharply drawn and psychologically complex characters whose lives and interactions feel very real—and are sometimes heartbreakingly poignant.

  Carter Scholz is the author of Palimpsests (with Glenn Harcourt) and Kafka Americana (with Jonathan Lethem), and the novel Radiance, which was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as story collection The Amount to Carry. His electronic and computer-music compositions are available from the composer’s collective Frog Peak Music (www.frogpeak.org) as scores and on the CD 8 Pieces. He is an avid backpacker, amateur astronomer, and telescope builder. He plays jazz piano around the San Francisco Bay Area with the Inside Men. Contact them on their Web site at www.theinsidemen.com.

  The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

  —Nietzsche

  When a long shot is all you have, you’re a fool not to take it.

  —Romany saying

  for Cheryl

  1.

  The launch of Earth’s first starship went unremarked. The crew gave no interviews. No camera broadcast the hard light pulsing from its tail. To the plain eye, it might have been a common airplane.

  The media battened on multiple wars and catastrophes. The Arctic Ocean was open sea. Florida was underwater. Crises and opportunities intersected.

  World population was something over ten billion. No one was really counting any more. A few billion were stateless refugees. A few billion more were indentured or imprisoned.

  Oil reserves, declared as recently as 2010 to exceed a trillion barrels, proved to be an accounting gimmick, gone by 2020. More difficult and expensive sources—tar sands in Canada and Venezuela, natural-gas fracking—became primary, driving up atmospheric methane and the price of freshwater.

  The countries formerly known as the Third World stripped and sold their resources with more ruthless abandon than their mentors had. With the proceeds they armed themselves.

  The US was no longer the glopal hyperpower, but it went on behaving as if. Generations of outspending the rest of the world combined had made this its habit and brand: arms merchant to expedient allies, former and future foes alike, starting or provoking conflicts more or less at need, its constant need being, as always, resources. Its waning might was built on a memory of those vast native reserves it had long since expropriated and depleted, and a sense of entitlement to more. These overseas conflicts were problematic and carried wildly unintended consequences. As the President of Venezuela put it just days before his assassination, “It’s dangerous to go to war against your own asshole.”