Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall-tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly. “Just imagine, diving into that sea…. ”Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

  “Nice case of wind-burn you’ve got there,” someone jeers: Kas. Suddenly, Lilly’s avatar, heretofore clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat, and waggles sausage-fingers up at them in warning.

  “Same to you and the window you climbed in through!” Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual deathmatch: it’s a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would indicate.

  Amber turns back to her slate: she’s working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 × 10 27 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them—debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here—and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a u-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans—one from Mars, two more from LEO—and it looks as if colonization would explode except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove’s mass.

  Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

  She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s Su Ang. “Look, we’re going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It’s insane.”

  Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection Agency?”

  “Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any well-springs, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers—’”

  “—Of a mine on Amalthea? Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface?” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.

  On the wall in front of her someone—Nicky or Boris, probably—has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She’s being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked out of her distraction—and angry—Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight: it’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike rips off the dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

  “Children! Chill out.” She glances round: one of the Franklins (this is the twenty-something dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. “Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

  Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight: it’s a forceful exchange of opinions.”

  “Hah.” The Franklin leans back in mid-air, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one before. Anyway—” she-they gesture and the screen goes blank “—I’ve got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance to earn our upkeep….”

  Amber is flashing on ancient history, three years back along her timeline. In her replay, she’s in some kind of split-level ranch house out west. It’s a temporary posting while her mother SciFiction fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperonage earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that!”

  Her mother is a blond ice-maiden madonna, one of the IRS’s most productive bounty hunters—she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a tow-headed eight-year-old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: “Don’t want to!” One of her stance demons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “They’ll beat up on me, Mom. I’m too different. ’Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can socialize real good at home.”

  Mom does something unexpected: she kneels down, putting herself on eye level with Amber. They’re on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange paisley wallpaper: the domestics are in hiding while the humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau de cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client’s fear. “I know that’s what your father’s writing to you, but it isn’t true. You need the company—physical company—of children your own age. You’re natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company, or they grow up all weird. Don’t you know how much you mean to me? I want you to grow up happy, and that won’t happen if you don’t learn to get along with children your own age. You’re not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you’ve got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. That which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

  It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber’s corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber—in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports—is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment: but her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

  Mom stands up, eyes distant—probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work, and I’ve got a treat for you: we’re going to check out a new Church together this evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You be a good little girl, now, all right?”

>   The Imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

  His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: he performs salat on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life-support and scholarship. A student of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other mujtahid scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective—one they’ll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness: and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.

  Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: unlike the orphanage crew, he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock-off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese-type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail: but the clunky, nineteen-sixties lookalike—a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can—has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail: built in orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake shield-facilities, it dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the Ummah, but he feels acutely alone out here: when he turns his compact observatory’s mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s superior size speaks of the efficiency of the western financial instruments, semi-autonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury: but surely it would have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

  After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of extra precious minutes on his mat. He finds that meditation comes hard in this environment: kneel in silence and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third-hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station: but who’s to say if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

  Sadeq shakes his head: he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: he steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is by now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment that his parents—a car factory worker and his wife—raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes: a couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant sura of the maintenance log: it’s time to fix this leaky joint for good.

  An hour or so of serious plumbing, and then he will eat (freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down), then sit down to review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow, there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo 13, maybe. It isn’t easy, being the only crew aboard a long-duration space mission: and it’s even harder for Sadeq, up here with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way—and so far as he knows he’s the only believer within half a billion kilometers.

  Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom calls her “your father’s fancy bitch,” with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom hit her—not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

  The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blond, like Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut really short, mannish.) “Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to ’im?”

  It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: it’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let me, auntie ’Nette—”

  “Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice as long as her mother did, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”

  Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the rest room because it isn’t break time and she told teacher she had to go right now: “I’m sure, P 20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?

  “Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for you.”

  Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi—Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

  “No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

  “Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you call me. Understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to know why I called?”

  “Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest? How’ve things been, anyway?”

  She’s going to have to be brief: the disposaphone comes pre-paid, the international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what she wants; I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt—I can’t even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

  The view of her father shakes, pans around to show her tante Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

  Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

  An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupi
ter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

  Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack-time (at least, not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor—they’re lighter on the life-support consumables than adults—working the kids twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future. (When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich—but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.