In any case, he had no wish to spoil the charade. Whatever the Steveware thought it was doing, Lincoln hoped it would believe it was working perfectly, all the way from Steve’s small-town childhood to whatever age it needed to reach before it could write this creation into flesh and blood, congratulate itself on a job well done, and then finally, mercifully, dissolve into rat piss and let the world move on.
A fortnight after they’d arrived, without warning, Lincoln was no longer needed. He knew it when he woke, and after breakfast the woman at Reception asked him, politely, to pack his bags and hand back the keys. Lincoln didn’t understand, but maybe Ty’s family had moved out of Steve’s hometown and the friends hadn’t stayed in touch. Lincoln had played his part; now he was free.
When they returned to the lobby with their suitcases, Dana spotted them, and asked Lincoln if he was willing to be debriefed. He turned to his grandmother. “Are you worried about the traffic?” He’d already phoned his father and told him they’d be back by dinnertime.
She said, “You should do this. I’ll wait in the truck.”
They sat at a table in the lobby. Dana asked his permission to record his words, and he told her everything he could remember.
When Lincoln had finished, he said, “You’re the Stevologist. You think they’ll get there in the end?”
Dana gestured at her phone to stop recording. “One estimate,” she said, “is that the Stevelets now comprise a hundred thousand times the computational resources of all the brains of all the human beings who’ve ever lived.”
Lincoln laughed. “And they still need stage props and extras, to do a little VR?”
“They’ve studied the anatomy of ten million human brains, but I think they know that they still don’t fully understand consciousness. They bring in real people for the bit parts, so they can concentrate on the star. If you gave them a particular human brain, I’m sure they could faithfully copy it into software, but anything more complicated starts to get murky. How do they know their Steve is conscious, when they’re not conscious themselves? He never gave them a reverse Turing test, a checklist they could apply. All they have is the judgment of people like you.”
Lincoln felt a surge of hope. “He seemed real enough to me.” His memories were blurred—and he wasn’t even absolutely certain which of Ty’s four friends was Steve—but none of them had struck him as less than human.
Dana said, “They have his genome. They have movies; they have blogs; they have e-mails: Steve’s, and a lot of people who knew him. They have a thousand fragments of his life. Like the borders of a giant jigsaw puzzle.”
“So that’s good, right? A lot of data is good?”
Dana hesitated. “The scenes you described have been played out thousands of times before. They’re trying to tweak their Steve to write the right e-mails, pull the right faces for the camera—by himself, without following a script like the extras. A lot of data sets the bar very high.”
As Lincoln walked out to the parking lot, he thought about the laughing, carefree boy he’d called Chris. Living for a few days, writing an e-mail—then memory-wiped, re-set, started again. Climbing a water tower, making a movie of his friends, but later turning the camera on himself, saying one wrong word—and wiped again.
A thousand times. A million times. The Steveware was infinitely patient, and infinitely stupid. Each time it failed it would change the actors, shuffle a few variables, then run the experiment over again. The possibilities were endless, but it would keep on trying until the sun burned out.
Lincoln was tired. He climbed into the truck beside his grandmother, and they headed for home.
Hellfire at Twilight
KAGE BAKER
One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ’90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, and Amazing and elsewhere. Her first Company novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. More Company novels quickly followed, including Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, and The Machine’s Child, as well as a chapbook novella, The Empress of Mars, and her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. Her many stories have been collected in Black Projects, White Knights; Mother Aegypt and Other Stories; The Children of the Company; and Dark Mondays. Her most recent books include a new novel, The Sons of Heaven. Coming up is another new novel, Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key. In addition to writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.
Here, in company with a time-traveling immortal, she helps us gain entrance to a famous and very exclusive club, one that’s very hard to get into—and even harder to get out of.
On a certain autumn day in the year 1774, a certain peddler walked the streets of a certain residential district in London.
His pack was full, because he wasn’t really making much of an effort to sell any of his wares. His garments were shabby, and rather large for him, but clean, and cut with a style making it not outside the powers of imagination that he might in fact be a dashing hero of some kind. One temporarily down on his luck, perhaps. Conceivably the object of romantic affection.
He whistled as he trudged along; doffed his hat and made a leg when the coaches of the great rumbled by, spattering him with mud. When occasionally hailed by customers, he stopped and rifled through his pack with alacrity, producing sealing wax, bobbins of thread, blotting paper, cheap stockings, penny candles, tinderboxes, soap, pins, and buttons. His prices were reasonable, his manner deferential without being fawning, but he was nonetheless unable to make very many sales.
Indeed, so little notice was taken of him that he might as well have been invisible when he slipped down an alley and came out into one of the back lanes that ran behind the houses. This suited his purposes, however.
He proceeded along the backs of sheds and garden fences with an ease born of familiarity, and went straight to a certain stretch of brick wall. He balanced briefly on tiptoe to peer over, then knocked at the gate in a certain pattern, rap-a-rap rap.
The gate was opened by a maid, with such abruptness it was pretty evident she’d been lurking there, waiting for his knock.
“You ain’t half behind your time,” she said.
“I was assailed by profitable custom,” he replied, sweeping off his hat and bowing. “Good morning, my dear! What have you for me today?”
“Gooseberry,” she said. “Only it’s gone cold, you know.”
“I shan’t mind that one whit,” the peddler replied, swinging his pack round. “And I have brought you something particularly nice in return.”
The maid looked at his pack with eager eyes. “Ooooh! You never found one!”
“Wait and see,” said the peddler, with a roguish wink. He reached into the very bottom of his pack and brought out an object wrapped in brown paper. Presenting it to the maid with a flourish, he watched as she unwrapped it.
“You never!” she cried. She whipped a glass lens out of her apron pocket and held the object up, examining it closely.
“Masanao of Kyoto, that is,” she announced. “Here’s the cartouche. Boxwood. Very nice. Some sort of funny little dog, is it?”
“It’s a fox, I believe,” said the peddler.
“So it is. Well! What a stroke of luck.” The maid tucked both lens and netsuke into her apron pocket. “You might go by Limehouse on your rounds, you know; they do say there’s all sorts of curious thing
s to be had there.”
“What a good idea,” said the peddler. He hefted his pack again and looked at her expectantly.
“Oh! Your pie, to be sure. La! I was that excited, I did forget.” The maid ran indoors, and returned a moment later with a small pie wrapped in a napkin. “Extra well lined, just as you asked.”
“Not a word to your good master about this, however,” said the peddler, laying his finger beside his nose. “Eh, my dear?”
“Right you are,” said the maid, repeating the gesture with a knowing wink. “He don’t miss all that old parchment, busy as he is, and now there’s ever so much more room in that spare cupboard.”
The peddler took his leave and walked on. Finding a shady spot with a view of the Thames, he sat down and ever-so-carefully lifted the pie out of its parchment shell, though he was obliged to peel the last sheet free, it having been well gummed with gooseberry leakage. He spread the sheets out across his lap, studying them thoughtfully as he bit into the pie. They were closely written in much-blotted ink, ancient jottings in a quick hand.
“‘Whatte to fleshe out thys foolyshe farye play? Too insubstancyal. Noble courte of Oberon nott unlike Theseus his courte. The contrast invydious. Yet too much wit in that lyne and the M of Revylls lyketh it not. Lovers not sufficienclye pleasing of themseylves. Thinke. Thinke, Will. Thinke,’” he read aloud, through a full mouth.
“‘How yf a rustick brought in? None can fynde fawlt there by Jesu. Saye a weaver, bellowes-mender or some suche in the woodes by chance. Excellent good meate for Kempe. JESU how yf a companye of rusticks??? As who should bee apying we players? Memo, speake wyth Burbage on thys …’”
At that moment he blinked, frowned, and shook his head. Red letters were dancing in front of his eyes: TOXIC RESPONSE ALERT.
“I beg your pardon?” he murmured aloud. Vaguely he waved a hand through the air in front of his face, as though swatting away flies, while he ran a self-diagnostic. The red letters were not shooed away, yet neither did his organic body appear to be having any adverse reactions to anything he was tasting, touching, or breathing.
But the red letters did fade slightly after a moment. He shrugged, had another mouthful of pie, and kept reading.
“‘Cost of properteyes: not so muche an it might be, were we to use agayne the dresses fro thatt Merlyne playe—’”
TOXIC RESPONSE ALERT, cried the letters again, flashing bright. The peddler scowled in real annoyance, and ran another self-diagnostic. He received back the same result as before. He looked closely at the pie in his hand. It appeared wholesome, with gooseberry filling oozing out between buttery crusts, and he was rather hungry.
With a sigh, he wrapped it in a pocket handkerchief and set it aside. Carefully he packed the Shakespeare notes in a flat folder and slid it into his pack, took up the pie again, and walked away quickly in the direction of St. Paul’s.
There was a stately commercial edifice of brick built on a slope, presenting its respectable upper stories level with the busy street above. The side facing downhill to the river, however, looked out on one of the grubbier waste grounds in London, thickly grown with weeds. Little winding dog paths crossed the area, and the peddler followed one to an unobtrusive-looking door set in the cellar wall of the aforementioned edifice. He did not knock but stood patiently, waiting as various unseen devices scanned him. Then the door swung inward and he stepped inside.
He walked down an aisle between rows of desks, at which sat assorted gentlemen or ladies working away at curious blue-glowing devices. One or two people nodded to him as he passed, or waved a languid pen. He smiled pleasantly but proceeded past them to a low flight of stairs and climbed to a half landing, which opened out on private offices. One door bore a sign in gold lettering that read REPAIRS.
The peddler opened the door, looked in and called hesitantly:
“Yoo-hoo, Cullender, are you receiving?”
“What the hell is it now?” said someone from behind a painted screen. A face rose above the screen, glaring through what appeared to be a pair of exceedingly thick spectacles. “Oh, it’s you, Lewis. Sorry, been trying to catch the last episode of Les Vampires, and there’s an Anthropologist over in Cheapside who keeps transmitting on my channel, all in a panic because he thinks—well, never mind. What can I do for you?”
Lewis set the half-eaten pie down on Cullender’s desk blotter. “Would you mind very much scanning this for toxins?”
Cullender blinked in surprise at it. He switched off the ring holo, removed it, and came around the screen to unwrap the handkerchief.
“Gooseberry,” he observed. “Looks all right to me.”
“Well, but when I take a bite of it, I get this Red Alert telling me it’s toxic,” said Lewis, holding his fingers up at eye level and making jerky little stabs at the air to signify flashing lights. Cullender frowned, perplexed. He took off his wig, draped it over a corner of the screen, and scratched his scalp.
“You ran a self-diagnostic, I suppose?”
“I certainly did. I appear to be fit as a fiddle.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“From the cook of a certain collector of rare documents,” said Lewis, lowering his voice.
“Oh! Oh! The, er, Shakespeare correspondence?” Cullender looked at the pie with new respect. He turned it over carefully, as though expecting to find the front page of Loves Labours Wonne stuck there.
“I’ve already peeled the parchment off,” said Lewis. “But I did wonder, you know, whether some sort of chemical interaction with old parchment, or the ink perhaps … ?”
“To be sure.” Cullender took hold of the pie with both hands and held it up. He stared at it intently. His eyes seemed to go out of focus, and in a flat voice he began rattling off a chemical analysis of ingredients.
“No; nothing unusual,” he said in a perfectly normal voice, when he had done. He took a bite of the pie and chewed thoughtfully. “Delicious.”
“Any flashing red letters?”
“Nary a one. Half a minute—I’ve thought of something.” Cullender went to a shelf and took down what appeared to be a small Majolica ware saucer. He held it out to Lewis. “Spit, there’s a good fellow.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just hoick up a good one. Don’t be shy. It’s the latest thing in noninvasive personnel chemistry diagnostics.”
“But I’ve already run a diagnostic,” said Lewis in tones of mild exasperation, and spat anyway.
“Well, but, you see, this gives us a different profile,” said Cullender, studying the saucer as he swirled its contents to and fro. “Yes … yes, I thought as much. Ah ha! Perfectly clear now.”
“Would you care to enlighten me?”
“It’s nothing over which you need be concerned. Merely a crypto-allergy,” said Cullender, as he stepped into a back cubicle and rinsed off the dish.
“I’m sorry?”
“Had you lived your life as a mortal man, you’d have been allergic to gooseberries,” said Cullender, returning to his desk. “But when we underwent the process that made us cyborgs, our organic systems were given the ability to neutralize allergens. Nonetheless, sometimes a little glitch in the software reads the allergen as an active toxin—sends you a warning, when in fact you have nothing to fear from the allergen at all, a mere false alarm. Don’t let it trouble you, my friend!”
“But I’ve eaten gooseberries plenty of times,” said Lewis.
“You may have become sensitized,” said Cullender. “Had a mortal acquaintance once became allergic to asparagus at the age of forty. One day he’s happily wolfing it down with mayonnaise—next day he’s covered in hives the size of half crowns at the mere smell of the stuff.”
“Yes, but I’m a cyborg,” said Lewis, with a certain amount of irritation.
“Well—a minor error in programming, perhaps,” said Cullender. “Who knows why these things happen, eh? Could be sunspots.”
“There haven’t been any,” said Lewis.
“Ah. True. Well, been in for an upgrade recently?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you ought, then,” said Cullender. “And in the meanwhile, just avoid gooseberries! You’ll be fine.”
“Very well,” said Lewis stiffly, tucking his handkerchief back in his pocket. “Good day.”
He turned and left the REPAIRS office. Behind him, Cullender surreptitiously picked up the rest of the pie and crammed it into his mouth.
Lewis proceeded down the hall to the cloakroom, where he claimed a change of clothes, and continued to the showers. He bathed, attired himself in a natty ensemble and neat powdered wig that made him indistinguishable from any respectable young clerk in the better offices in London, and went back to the cloakroom to turn in his peddler’s outfit. The pack went with it, save for the folder containing the Shakespeare notes.
“Literature Preservation Specialist Grade Three Lewis,” said the cloak warden meditatively. “Your case officer’s expecting you, you know. Upstairs.”
“Ah! I could just do with a cup of coffee,” said Lewis. He tucked the folder under his arm, set his tricorn on his head at a rakish angle, and went off down the hall to climb another flight of stairs.
Having reached the top, and having passed through no fewer than three hidden panels, he stepped out into the Thames Street coffee room that sat above the London HQ of Dr. Zeus Incorporated.
The coffee room, in its décor, reflected the Enlightenment: rather than being dark paneled, low beamed, and full of jostling sheep farmers clutching leathern jacks of ale, it was high ceilinged and spacious, with wainscoting painted white, great windows admitting the (admittedly somewhat compromised) light and air of a London afternoon, and full of clerks, politicians, and poets chatting over coffee served in porcelain cups imported from China.
Lewis threaded his way between the tables, smiling and nodding. He heard chatter of Gainsborough’s latest painting, and the disquiet in the American colonies. Three periwigged gentlemen in tailored silk of pastel Easter egg colors discussed Goethe’s latest. Two red-faced, jolly-looking elders pondered the fall of the Jesuits. A tableful of grim men in snuff-colored broadcloth debated the fortunes of the British East India Company. Someone else, in a bottle green waistcoat, was declaring that Mesmer was a fraud. And, over in a secluded nook, a gentleman of saturnine countenance was watching the room, his features set in an expression compounded of equal parts disdain and boredom.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 65
