The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  You woke up as we slowed to a stop. “Back in the real world?” I asked you, which was a bitchy thing to say.

  The Chinese man stood up and latched us all, in all languages. “You are all idiots!”

  Something to mull over: they, too, knew what we were doing.

  THE MAKURDI TAXI had a man in front who seemed to steer the thing. He was a Tiv gentleman. He liked to talk, which I think annoyed you a bit. Sociable, outgoing you. What a waste, when the AI can drive.

  Why have humans on the Voyage either?

  “You’re the eighth passengers I’ve have to take to the Base in two days. One a week is good business for me. Three makes me very happy.”

  He kept asking questions and got out of us what country we were from. We stuck to our cover story – we were here to teach Lusobras to the Nigerian Air Force. He wanted to know why they couldn’t use the babblefish. You chuckled and said, “You know how silly babblefish can make people sound.” You told the story of Uncle Kaué proposing to the woman from Amalfi. He’d said in Italian, “I want to eat your hand in marriage.” She turned him down.

  Then the driver asked, “So why no Chinese people?”

  We froze. He had a friendly face, but his eyes were hooded. We listened to the whisper of his engine. “Well,” he said, relenting. “They can’t be everywhere all the time.”

  The Co-op in all its propaganda talks about how international we all are: Brasil, Turkiye, Tivland, Lagos, Benin, Hindi, Yemen. All previous efforts in space have been fuelled by national narcissism. So we exclude the Chinese? Let them fund their own trip. And isn’t it wonderful that it’s all private financing? I wonder if space travel isn’t inherently racist.

  You asked him if he owned the taxi and he laughed. “Ay-yah! Zie owns me.” His father had signed the family over for protection. The taxi keeps him, and buys zirself a new body every few years. The taxi is immortal. So is the contract.

  What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?

  “Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something breaks, I can fix.”

  AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.

  I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.

  We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is 27 light years away.

  OUTSIDE MAKURDI AIR Force Base, aircraft stand on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump.

  Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.

  A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.

  “They say,” our taxi driver said, looking even more hooded than before, “that it will be launched today or tomorrow. The whole town knows. We’ll all be looking up to wave.” Our hearts stopped. He chuckled.

  We squeaked to a halt outside the reception bungalow. I suppose you thought his fare at him. I hope you gave him a handsome tip.

  He saluted and said, “I pray the weather keeps good for you. Wherever you are going.” He gave a sly smile.

  A woman in a blue-gray uniform bustled out to us. “Good, good, good. You are Graça and Cristina Spinoza Vaz? You must come. We’re boarding. Come, come, come.”

  “Can we unpack, shower first?”

  “No, no. No time.”

  We were retinaed and scanned, and we took off our shoes. It was as if we were so rushed we’d attained near-light speeds already and time was dilating. Everything went slower, heavier − my shoes, the bag, my heartbeat. So heavy and slow that everything glued itself in place. I knew I wasn’t going to go, and that absolutely nothing was going to make me. For the first time in my life.

  Graça, this is only happening because zey want it. Zey need us to carry zem. We’re donkeys.

  “You go,” I said.

  “What? Cristina. Don’t be silly.”

  I stepped backwards, holding up my hands against you. “No, no, no. I can’t do this.”

  You came for me, eyes tender, smile forgiving. “Oh, darling, this is just nerves.”

  “It’s not nerves. You want to do this; I do not.”

  Your eyes narrowed; the smile changed. “This is not the time to discuss things. We have to go! This is illegal. We have to get in and go now.”

  We don’t fight, ever, do we, Graça? Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? Two people who have been trapped together on the 24th floor all of their lives and yet they never fight. Do you not know how that happens, Graçfushka? It happens because I always go along with you.

  I just couldn’t see spending four years in a cramped little pod with you. Then spending a lifetime on some barren waste watching you organizing volleyball tournaments or charity lunches in outer space. I’m sorry.

  I knew if I stayed you’d somehow wheedle me onto that ship through those doors; and I’d spend the next two hours, even as I went up the gantry, even as I was sandwiched in cloth, promising myself that at the next opportunity I’d run.

  I pushed my bag at you. When you wouldn’t take it, I dropped it at your feet. I bet you took it with you, if only for the cupaçu.

  You clutched at my wrists, and you tried to pull me back. You’d kept your turquoise bracelet and it looked like all the things about you I’d never see again. You were getting angry now. “You spent a half trillion reais on all the surgeries and and and and Rhodopsin... and and and the germ cells, Cris! Think of what that means for your children here on Earth, they’ll be freaks!” You started to cry. “You’re just afraid. You’re always so afraid.”

  I pulled away and ran.

  “I won’t go either,” you wailed after me. “I’m not going if you don’t.”

  “Do what you have to,” I shouted over my shoulder. I found a door and pushed it and jumped down steps into the April heat of Nigeria. I sat on a low stucco border under the palm trees in the shade, my heart still pumping; and the most curious thing happened. I started to chuckle.

  I REMEMBER AT seventeen, I finally left the apartment on my own without you, and walked along the street into a restaurant. I had no idea how to get food. Could I just take a seat? How would I know what they were cooking?

  Then like the tide, an AI flowed in and out of me and I felt zie/me pluck someone nearby, and a waitress came smiling, and ushered me to a seat. She would carry the tray. I turned the AI off because, dear Lord, I have to be able to order food by myself. So I asked the waitress what was on offer. She rolled her eyes back for just a moment, and she started to recite. The AI had to tell her. I couldn’t remember what she’d said, and so I asked her to repeat. I thought: this is no good.

  THE BASE OF the rocket sprouted what looked like giant cauliflowers and it inched its way skyward. For a moment I thought it would have to fall. But it kept on going.

  Somewhere three months out, it will start the engines, which drive the ship by making new universes, something so complicated human beings cannot do it. The AI will make holograms so you won’t feel enclosed. You’ll sit in Pamukkale, Turkiye. Light won’t get through the Fabric so you’ll never look out on Jupiter. The main AI will have some cute, international name. You can finish your dissertation on Libro del cortegiano – you’ll be able to read every translation – zey carry all the world’s knowledge. You’ll walk through Urbino. The AI will viva your PhD. Zey’ll be there in your head watching when you stand on the alien rock. It will be zir flag you’ll be planting. Instead of Brasil’s.

  I watched you dwindle into a spark o
f light that flared and turned into a star of ice-dust in the sky. I latched Emilda and asked her if I could stay with her, and after a stumble of shock, she said of course. I got the same taxi back. The rooftops were crowded with people looking up at the sky.

  But here’s the real joke. I latched our bank for more money. Remember, we left a trillion behind in case the launch was once again canceled?

  All our money had been taken. Every last screaming centavo. Remember what I said about fraud?

  So.

  Are you sure that spaceship you’re on is real?

  EMERGENCE

  Gwyneth Jones

  GWYNETH JONES (www.gwynethjones.uk) was born in Manchester, England and is the author of more than twenty novels for teenagers, mostly under the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF novels for adults. She has won two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the Philip K. Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Recent books include novel Spirit, essay collection Imagination/Space, and story collection The Universe of Things. Her latest novel is The Grasshopper’s Child, a young adult novel in the ‘Bold as Love’ sequence. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son, a Tonkinese cat called Ginger, and her young friend Milo.

  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 a serial-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 eye-blink. Apparently not. She’d left without a goodbye, 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 commensurate ‘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 of 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 chilli 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.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so prejudiced.”

  “Humans are so squeamish,” teased Simon.

  “Humans are human,” said Arc. “That’s the fun of them.”

  They were always our children, begotten not created, as the old saying goes. There’s no such thing as a sentient AI not born of human mind. But never purely human: Simon, my embodied housemate, had magpie neurons in his background. Arc took human form for pleasure, but her being was pure information, the elemental stuff of the universe. They had gone beyond us, as children do. We had become just one strand in their past –

  The entry lock chimed. It was Anton, my clerk, a slope-shouldered, barrelchested bod with a habitually doleful expression. He looked distraught.

  “Apologies for disturbing you at home Rom. May I come in?”

  He sat on Arc’s couch, silent and grim. Two of my little dream-tigers, no bigger than geckos, emerged from the miniature jungle of our bamboo and teak room divider and sat gazing at him, tails around their paws.