Year's Best SF 1

by David G. Hartwell

  My mind traveled elsewhere. I thought, I'm gonna cancel the contract with Gloria. I don't care what it sets me back.

  Contracts no longer excited me. Gloria could have whispered a thousand legal injunctions in my ear, and I would have felt no tremor of lust. I understood something of Trumble's behavior. He was a throw-back to the Decadence, back when people entered sexual relationships without any legal counsel or strictures, often long before twenty-five, the present age of consent. He had been a sick man. A dream had sucked him in, and he had unraveled. He had gone looking for Zera's human source, and he had gone looking with all the resources of a rich man and all the determination of a madman. He had found her. And Baker had to have known about it.

  I would never prove it, but surely Baker had killed Sammy Hood. There might be other suspects, but Baker was the only one with the ability to breech Security at ComWick.

  I studied Zera Terminal as her mouth opened and her tongue licked her upper lip in a slow, lazy roll. Even on a flat, desire permeated the screen.

  I watched Zera Terminal, naked, pout. I watched her stamp her foot in childish pique. I watched her eyes flash.

  Who are you? I wondered.

  I understood Bloom's obsession with a holo. “Is love Big R or Little R?” he had asked.

  A graduate in rational metaphysics might have had trouble answering that one. Do you hunger for the body or the soul?

  The American Midnight flats unsettled me. I could not then say why, although the truth, once revealed, was obvious—and would be, I thought, to every Viewer damned by it.

  Like that famous, pre-Decadence character Hamlet, I wasn't getting anywhere with the philosophical loops. Vengeance required some action.

  I needed the name of Zera's human-map, but I could be killed the minute my search surfaced in a C-View Actions file. So I was careful. I found nothing in the open files.

  It was Captain Armageddon who gave me the name.

  I was watching the recorded playbacks from the under-Highway. I watched the amok Armageddon tearing Jim Havana into pieces. The regressing holo spoke in a garbled rattle. The name was there: Keravnin. There were four Keravnins locally—and only one was a probable.

  She lived on Maplethorpe, down in the high-rent Op district. Keravnin read out as the only child of wealthy parents. She'd had a brief career as a model for sex-boutique prototypes, but she'd never registered with any of the big agencies. She had the usual privileged list of social outlets, and old board files suggested an extended relate contract with Korl Mox, the sound designer. They'd consummated the contract but signed off when their compatibility index slid to four. Her current relate file was uninformative. It could have been tampered with, or perhaps Keravnin wasn't of sufficient social standing to warrant a longer report on the Window.

  Her profile showed the standard cultural acquisitiveness. There was a narcissistic strain in the emotion modules she bought. She had a thing for old film prints. And she had a passion for late-twentieth century CDs, specializing in fashionable pretense-pop.

  That was my entrance. I wrote myself a retroscenario as a collector. It wouldn't stand under scrutiny, so I would just have to hope no one was looking.

  I sold her two CDs on the Net before I suggested we meet.

  I sat in her pricey Op digs, cradling a Michael Penn CD that I was going to let her have for half of what it cost me.

  Sennie Keravnin was not what I expected. Two years down from forty, her beauty was intact, but there was something brittle in her every gesture, some shrillness in her laughter. I saw her twenty years from now in a new cosmetic workup, coyly signing short-term contracts. I was looking for the connection with Zera Terminal, and looking, I found it. The same high cheekbones, the same elegant jaw line. The holo had obviously been a fantasized facsimile (still a gray agree at Morals). Keravnin looked like Zera Terminal if I squinted my eyes. But, in some fundamental way, there was no connection at all.

  We talked about pretense pop, agreed that groups with any sense of humor were second-rate, that the great strength of such music was its self-referential seriousness.

  She was a heavy fan. I'd done my homework, but I didn't know half the names. Fortunately, an occasional murmur of assent was all she required.

  I had ample time to study the room while she talked. It was generic in its way: expensive holoprints, temp walls, organic projections. A wall shelf held a number of tactile-dolls, including the popular Koala AI. I found these artifacts of girlhood depressing. There should be an age cut-off for cute. Again, I saw Sennie Keravnin inhabiting her future, cuddling a worn childhood toy, smiling coyly at some tarnished father figure.

  We talked for perhaps twenty minutes. I sold her the CD and left.

  I went home. I thought about Keravnin. She didn't look like a rape victim. But what did I know about that? What did a rape victim look like? It was a crime requiring access, a crime from the Decadence, a crime now out of context.

  If I could prove that she had been raped, and that Baker knew about it, I could have Baker put away forever. Trumble was dead; I couldn't kill him again, but I could shut down the engineer of all this evil.

  For Bloom. Who bloomed so briefly. Just a kid. I saw Bloom and Zera wrestling in the garden, water and laughter exploding in the air.

  I knew then. I knew the way everyone will know when it hits the Window. And I guess it will take a while to take it in. The knowing carries some emotional freight, and it isn't processed easily.

  I logged on. I called up Keravnin's medical. There it was. Nothing hidden. What's to hide when no one is looking?

  I called Morals and left a message for a guy named Gill Hedron. I turned the flat-view off and went out into the night.

  I sat in a Sympathy bar and waited for Hedron to arrive. I had no doubt that he would come. Hedron was a lieutenant with Morals.

  “My partner and I did the Armageddon wipe,” I had told the interface. “I've got something that will put Jell Baker away.”

  Hedron was the man who had logged the most time on the Baker file at Morals. I figured Hedron was frustrated, willing to take a chance.

  He came. He was a small, unshaven guy, and like every righteous I'd ever met out of Morals, he spoke in short, edited bursts of disbelief.

  “Yeah, I got nothing better to do,” he said when I thanked him for coming. “Maybe I'll kick your ass, just for something to do.”

  I told him what I knew.

  He listened. When I finished, he said, “You got nothing.”

  “But we could get it,” I said.

  “You don't have anything to lose,” he told me. “I still got some prospects. I still got dreams.”

  “Ever dream of closing the lid on Baker?” I asked.

  Hedron sighed. I could see my eloquence had won him over.

  Driving into the Op, I thought about American Midnight. It sold sex, sure, but so did every other holoshow. Sex wasn't a rare item. Most shows logged a couple of weeks and were gone. American Midnight was running strong at eight months when Trumble took himself out. Why the long run? Because Midnight had something new to sell.

  Hedron called into Morals and had them shut down all security traps and failsafes for the Keravnin res.

  We rendezvoused with three Sony cops and a coordinating Legal and were in the building in two minutes.

  We blew the door, Legal started recording, and Sennie Keravnin came running out of the bedroom. There was panic on her sleep-rumpled face, but something calculating took command; you could almost watch the fear scuttle for ratholes. If I had looked deep into her eyes, I probably could have seen the thoughts passing. Can Baker get me out of this? What's the best deal? Can I nail these assholes on an unwarranted?

  I walked past her, down the long hall, and stopped as the door slid open and the curly headed child came blinking into the light. She wore a blue shift with cartoon Towsers on it. Her Koala-doll clung to her neck.

  “Mommy?” the girl said.

  “Sara,” I said, “It's all
right. Everything is okay.”

  She looked at me with those famous eyes. “I don't know you.”

  “It's okay,” I said.

  “I want my mommy.” They hadn't altered the voice at all. This was Zera's voice in all its wonder and trust. The voice match-up alone would have been enough to shut C-View down.

  I took Sara's hand and we walked back down the hall.

  We all checked in at Morals. It was a long night. When the statements were down, Hedron offered to drive me home. He was full of triumph and sudden camaraderie. He slapped my back. “We got the son-of-a-bitch. You can still see the implant scars where they read her for the holo, and there has got to be a synaptic map at C-View that will match.”

  “I'm glad,” I said.

  Home to my white light. I logged on the Net for the latest. The Broad Highway was a desert, glitched with static and noise. They didn't identify the soundtrack, but I could, a sobbing child, blown to monstrous volume by the public hunger for innocence.

  “It's going to be all right,” I had told Sara, whose fantasy lover had come looking for her off-line—and found her.

  Sennie Keravnin said she didn't know anything about that. She had no idea Trumble was a map for Captain Armageddon or that her daughter was being read for Zera. Sara was supposed to be mapped for a kid's show. That's how the contract read. And Trumble was just supposed to be some C-View exec.

  I wanted to believe Sennie Keravnin.

  Jell Baker was a genius in his way, I realized. The public was sick of illusion—sick of the virtual shimmer. They longed for the Big R. They thirsted for innocence.

  Real innocence. No imitations accepted.

  Sara Keravnin would be nine next month. I wondered if Bloom had known that?

  Probably not. But I thought of that line carved in silver over Fed Legal, a quote from before the Decadence, a quote from that guy who wrote Hamlet. You know, the one that goes: “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”

  I guess that says it all.

  For White Hill

  JOE HALDEMAN

  Joe Haldeman is one of the great living science fiction writers, known worldwide for his hard SF adventure stories particularly. His most recent novel however, released in 1995, was not SF. 1968 is an ambitious attempt to represent and confront a year spent as a soldier in Vietnam. His SF novels include Mindbridge, The Forever War, Buying Time and The Hemingway Hoax. His short fiction ranges from humor to horror, but most often has a darkness deep within it. Such is “For White Hill”: a romance set against the staggering background of the approaching doom of Earth. This was one of five fine novellas (by Haldeman, Greg Bear, Donald M. Kingsbury, Charles Sheffield and Paul Anderson) published this year in Far Futures, the excellent original anthology of hard SF edited by Gregory Benford this year.

  1

  I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.

  Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

  Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was “roach,” or at least that's as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

  One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can't defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between “How are you?” and “Fine.”

  The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.

  White Hill and I were “bred” for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.

  I didn't like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

  When I worked through the final airlock cycle, for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint. Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

  “Welcome home,” she said. “You're Water Man.”

  She inflected it properly, which surprised me. “You're from Petros?”

  “Of course not.” She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. “Galan, an island on Seldene. I've studied your cultures, a little language.”

  “You don't dress like that on Seldene, either.” Not anywhere I'd been on the planet.

  “Only at the beach. It's so warm here.”

  I had to agree. Before I came out, they'd told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

  She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. “My name is White Hill. Zephyr-Meadow-Torrent.”

  “Where are the others?” I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

  “Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration.”

  “You've already been around?”

  “No.” She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. “All the story's here, anywhere. It isn't really about history or culture.”

  Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. “Did you visit my world when you were studying it?”

  “No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago.” She smiled at me. “It was almost as beautiful as I'd imagined it.” She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn't say it precisely in English, which doesn't have a palindromic mood: Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

  “When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I've learned a lot from your sculpture, though.”

  “How young can you be?” To earn this honor, I did not say.

  “In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-
squeeze.”

  I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that's about forty-five years' squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than forty light-years from her planet. That leaves enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.

  She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. “Don't overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to ThetaKent after your world.”

  “Really? When I was there?”

  “No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went.” She made a palindrome in my language: Predator becomes prey becomes predator? “So here we are. Perhaps I can still learn from you.”

  I didn't much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: “I'm more likely to learn from you.”

  “Oh, I don't think so.” She smiled in a measured way. “You don't have much to learn.”

  Or much I could, or would, learn. “Have you been down to the water?”

  “Once.” She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. “It's interesting. Doesn't look real.” I picked up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

  “First body?” I asked.

  “I'm not tired of it yet.” She gave me a sideways look, amused. “You must be on your fourth or fifth.”

  “I go through a dozen a year.” She laughed. “Actually, it's still my second. I hung on to the first too long.”

  “I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible.”

  “Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute.” I had been making a “controlled” fracture in a large boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. “It affected all of my work, of course. I can't even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body.”