Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad now. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district—she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it—just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a psycho bitch control-freak and ever since she had to face up to losing Dad she’s been working her claws into Amber—which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well-networked to boot. But now Mom’s found a way of fucking Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things.

  Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meatspace den.

  There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger—adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire’s mind, making him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age—apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than the others at running Bob, and she’s no slouch when she’s being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.

  Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toad-spawn. She’s almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

  “Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number-six hex head.”

  “Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a fly-wheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself—Amber passes it under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is busy.”

  “I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of vacuuming to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

  A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He can’t,” she repeats, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag. “Here, catch.”

  Amber grabs the bag: too late, she discovers that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped baby tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. “Eew!”

  Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toadspawn with garbage bags and paper—by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whirr, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was really clever,” Monica says emphatically, as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

  “No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

  “I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe. “I’m going to have to go back and re-fit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?”

  “Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

  “All right, Bob coming online.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your mother’s kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Amber frowns.

  “So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

  Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I ran away from home. Mom owned me—that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do—legally—but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

  “That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

  “Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery; those that do mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited-liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of shari’a law—and a crap human-rights record—but they’re just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative firewall.”

  “So.”

  “Well, I guess I was technically a Jannissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. But now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi’ism. Now, normally, Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully, and chose one that’s got a progressive view of women’s rights: they’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists! ‘What would the Prophet do if he were alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories.’ They generally take a progressive, almost westernized, view of things like legal equality of the sexes, because for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and—” She shrugs helplessly.

  “Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers?”

  “Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom—and me—as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: if I run that stuff, I’ll end up believing it!”

  “Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. “Now tell me why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

  “Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me, because I’m a minor. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me—but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well.”

  “Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day—it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your
way outside it: what can you do?”

  “Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about creating myself a new jurisdiction?”

  Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king: but there are other ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay…but I think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him against you.”

  The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level: they kick up clouds of reddish sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the surface. This close to Jupiter—a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape—the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clockface: for Amalthea orbits the master in under twelve hours. The Sanger’s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: radio is useless, and the human miners run their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site: once the circuits are connected, these will form a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly slowing the moon’s orbital momentum).

  Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble: disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s sent to clue-up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew: now she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

  She sighs again. “Pierre?”

  “Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane-fly lookalike, bouncing very slowly from toe-tip to toe-tip in the microgravity—the rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulfur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

  “You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next burn.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen: it’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

  “Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole—it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.”

  Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That’s good news. Once the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s only a kilometer and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the payload will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web-cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.

  The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit. Make yourself scarce, Pierre!” The incoming call nags at her attention. “Yeah? Who are you?”

  The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive-drab spacesuit liner. He’s floating between a TORU manual-docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at Mecca. “Good evening to you,” he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?”

  “Uh, yeah. That’s me.” She stares at him: he looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah—whatever an ayatollah is—elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”

  “I am Doctor Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?”

  He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. “Sure. Did my mom put you up to this?” They’re still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted: he isn’t using a grammar engine, he’s actually learned it the hard way. “If so, you want to be careful. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”

  “Yes, she did. Ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I have not noticed that. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?”

  Amber breathes deeply. “Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She’s—” she flails around for the right word helplessly. “Look. She’s the sort of person who can’t lose a fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”

  Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: he’s actually taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel—coming from someone more than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg—that she almost lets herself forget that he’s only talking to her because Mom set her up.

  “Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”

  “Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

  “Hmmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims—”

  “She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!”

  “A mother’s love—”

  “Fuck love!” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”

  Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your
interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly, “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

  “My mother—” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat—“My mother likes control.”

  “Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of—no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

  “My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him—they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

  “Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”