Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  Davy put one foot into the swing at the top of the Ferris wheel, and lowered himself into its cracked leather seat. On the outskirts of the amusement park, the City glowed with information, its cyber beams traced on the air’s moisture and dust. The beams hit the skyscrapers, piercing them, holding them in a web of light. Someday these buildings would go down to dust, for his kind had no need of cities. If you wanted someone in person, you didn’t need an office building.

  As Davy sat in his high perch, tears—that carry-over from Before—collected in his eyes. Jena should have been next to him. But she never would be again.

  How could those words have come from her mouth, how could she say, I can’t see you any more, baby ... can’t see you any more. He remembered those glittering eyes, fixing him with their go away look.

  He dragged his arm across his face, drying it. The tears wiped off, but not the shame. She’d sided with her parents, with her smirking mother, without a thought for the things they’d promised each other. That day will have to wait for awhile..... But who was she kidding? He wasn’t her kind, never would be. She was a smart elite, and he was just an underachiever, a bad boy with low fitness scores. Yeah, he was just boy to them.

  The Ferris wheel swing rocked on its hinges in a semblance of its old, mechanized self. Her presence felt real, too. Like him, Jena loved the odd, old places. Loved Davy too, as odd as he was, laughing at the things he said, holding his hand.

  Missing her, despising her—how could the heart hold such unlike things? He wanted to talk to her. He didn’t want to. Then, all in a muddle, he sought her in the information stream. Turning sideways to the Beam, he lifted his hand into its photonic flow, where the palm of his hand and the webs between his spread fingers formed a screen.

  Jena appeared in the cup of his hand. She wasn’t happy to see him. He felt it in his gut, her damning eyes, that go away look.

  Then she said, "Run, Davy. Get out of the Beam. Run for your life." And she was gone.

  In the next instant the Beam went blank. The Beam never went off. Yet suddenly the information flow evaporated, leaving an awful, dumb silence.

  Just before the pulse hit, he pulled out of the Beam, as a program surge swept by, threatening to erase everything that was encrypted as Davy’s life or Davy himself.

  They were going to purge him. And they knew exactly where he was.

  The swing lurched to and fro as he bolted to his feet. Then he was clambering down the Ferris wheel, half-falling from strut to strut, cutting his hands, bruising his feet.

  This time Jena didn’t say, go away. She said, run away. For a transhuman, Davy might be a little slow-witted. But he knew the difference.

  ~~~~~

  Huddling behind the ticket booth, Davy watched figures rush into the midway, toward the Ferris wheel. More proof that, contrary to all logic, they were trying to kill him. But why? He’d never heard of low scores being a capital crime. There was always some useful computation to be done, no matter how menial. Not that he planned to do menial work forever. He was studying, Jena was helping ...

  She’d said, run. But where could he go? The confusion that characterized his life claimed even this moment of crisis. He was torn between fleeing into the dark corners of the City or running to Jena, letting it end in one bright flash of erasure. Finally, he abandoned trying to decide, and let his feet take him where they would. He stumbled onward, careful to avoid the Beam, keeping his hands in his pockets. Here, amid the streets and buildings laced with high volume memory chips, he moved blind through a mute landscape. As he passed people on the street, he offered no Splash page from the Beam, no calling card announcing who he was. Because all that had been associated with Davy, all that was gone from the world.

  He saw that he was in Jena’s neighborhood. Not smart. But now that he was going to confront her family, he’d have to decide what to say to them. Maybe he’d start with, Don’t call me boy.

  From its place on the hill, Jena’s house beckoned him, its windows bright. It was there-earlier this night, but ages ago—when Jena had mouthed the words her mother put there, the words that damned him, banished him. Through the door, Davy had glimpsed her father in the parlor, standing in the Beam, assessing Davy’s scores, his worthiness to be a suitor. By his expression, the suitor would not do.

  And the mother’s expression, saying, You didn’t do it with him, did you? You didn’t share code? You know he’s not our kind….

  All they could think about was sex. He did hunger for Jena, he didn’t deny that. But it was a pure longing, not some sordid thing. The cyberworld depended on love and sex, didn’t it? They retained some of the old biological things, the things that suited the goals. Why not? Even the old biological evolution was built on the former structures. The mammalian brain incorporated the reptile brain, improving it. Now transhumans were changing through evolution as well-artificial evolution. Through reconfigurable circuits, Davy’s kind altered themselves on the fly using evolutionary algorithms. You set the goal, measured performance, then let high-scoring ALs mate and share software, but in the random way of love. From this fast shuffle of code, the progeny, some of them, were improved. And some weren’t.

  Upstairs, against the drawn shades, shadows moved. Muffled voices argued behind them. He thought he heard Jena’s voice, her mothers shrill one, her father’s bass.

  He started to turn up the walkway.

  A hand gripped his shoulder, stopping him. "Let’s take a walk, son."

  Startled, Davy turned to find a familiar face: his trainer from voc tech. The old man steered him forcefully into the shadow of a thick tree.

  "Bertram," Davy said. "You scared me."

  "I hope so." Bertram eyed him with that rheumy stare he had. His head caught the glare of the lamplight, despite his meticulous comb-over. "You were about two seconds from the big sleep," Bertram muttered.

  "I don’t care," Davy said.

  Bertram sucked on his teeth. Not that anyone needed teeth anymore, but the physical template didn’t much matter; extra stuff could go along for the ride. "I’m used to dealing with dimwits," he said, "but you’re a real low-watt wonder." He shoved Davy up against the tree trunk. "What good is it gonna do, your going up to that door and banging on it?"

  "I don’t ..." Davy struggled to justify himself.

  "You don’t. Yeah, that about sums it up. You don’t, Davy. You don’t perform, you don’t score, you don’t think." He released Davy, shaking his head.

  "I love her," Davy said, summoning the thing he was holding on to, amidst all the lost things.

  "I loooove her," Bertram mimicked, making it sound like a cow mooing. "If I had a gigabyte of RAM for every time I heard that pathetic statement, I’d be a smart elite, instead of stuck teaching dim wits how to be productive in society."

  "But I do," Davy insisted with some heat.

  Bertram closed his eyes, summoning patience. "You dumb shit. You think love solves anything?" He peered closely at his young student. "Yeah, you do. I been wasting my time, trying to teach you data entry. You’re even dumber than I thought."

  Davy pushed him away. "You can take your training and stuff it, old man."

  Bertram smiled, a crooked affair that was not always a sign of humor. "You got a way with words, all right. Now, unless you got more bright comments, let’s get our asses out of here. I don’t much care what they do to you, but I got myself to worry about, just standing here jawing with a loser like you."

  He hauled Davy down the sidewalk, as Davy craned his head around, watching the upstairs windows where yellow shades stared out blindly into the night. The house where they would never let him inside, where her voice still sang in his head:

  I can’t see you anymore, baby....

  Davy pulled his arm away, but kept up with Bertram. "Where are we going? Where is there to go?"

  Bertram sighed. "‘Where IS there to go’—ah, the lament of the tragic adolescent." Walking fast, they left Jena’s neighborhood, heading toward the City c
enter. "I got a place, all right," he continued "Might not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight smarter than walking into the Big Erase."

  Davy wasn’t so sure. There were a lot of things he wasn’t sure about anymore. "Time was," Bertram was saying, "in the old empire, they thought teaching a machine to love would be a big deal." He turned a sour face on Davy. "Well, it wasn’t. Affection is a naturally emerging feature of intelligent systems. So you ain’t special, son, if you thought you were."

  As they passed a few other folks, Bertram plunged his hand into the Beam, offering a polite hello.

  Up ahead, Davy saw the dark clot of forest that used to be the mid-town park. It was one of the old empire places where he and Jena liked to go. Few ALs went there, preferring the high bandwidths of the memory-embedded built environment.

  Bertram headed for a gate in a wrought iron fence. He opened it, shoving Davy through.

  Here, a primeval forest reigned, barely touched by the Beam that slanted through the green and dumb canopy.

  Bertram was still muttering, even as he peered beyond the fence to see if anyone followed. "Yeah, they thought they had to work at creating artificial intelligence. All those AI labs were left flat-footed, when we just took the leap without ‘em." He chuckled. "They were pissin’ and moanin’ about how to create consciousness—and we nailed it in four seconds flat." He grew more thoughtful. "But they never guessed what the really hard thing would be." He cocked his head at Davy. "Which was?"

  Davy was getting sick of the tirade and the old man’s superior attitude. "Is this some kind of test, or what?"

  Taking no notice, Bertram pronounced, "Ambiguity, Davy, ambiguity. Things tend to be either right or wrong in our world. Ever notice how easy it is to make decisions?" He glanced at his student. "No, I guess you never did. But it’s a snap for the rest of us. It has to be said, Davy: You live in a muddle."

  "But I think it’s what Jena liked about me."

  That got a snort from the old man. "She’s a smart elite. Hard to see what she’d like about a muddle."

  "She said she liked the questions I asked. I challenged her. She said most guys just wanted to share code."

  His teacher squinted at him. "You didn’t, did you?"

  Davy swung away, stalking to a rotting park bench, entwined with creepers. "That’s what everybody wants to know. Did we do it. You make me sick." As he kicked at the bench, his foot went through it, releasing a cloud of mold.

  From far off, came a noise, like the squawk of a bird, or the creak of a rusted gate.

  Looking in that direction, Bertram said, "We’re being followed. Damn."

  Bertram stepped close, whispering, but his words hit like ball peen hammers. "It’s time, Davy. Time to make up your mind what you want. Throw your life away for a girl you can’t have? Or think about Davy for once."

  Around them the woods creaked, as though it had been a long time since anybody stepped on its soft belly of leaves. The forest stirred, as people came through from different directions.

  "This way," Bertram said, and the two of them scrambled down a path, deeper into the park. At his side, he heard Bertram say, "It’s my fault they’re here, Davy. I’m sorry."

  Davy leapt over a rotting stump. "It’s nobody’s fault."

  "No, son, I screwed up. That’s why I’m helping you."

  As searchlights pierced the loamy darkness, Bertram and Davy ducked down into a thicket. Soon, a group of searchers were crashing about within a few yards of their hiding place. These people were nobody Davy knew, just everyday folks looking to kill him. But they kept moving, and soon he and Bertram were alone again. They stood, listening for footfalls and voices, but hearing only crickets.

  Now the old man’s voice was an urgent whisper. "There was something different about you from the beginning, Davy. You’re dumb, all right, your scores are bad, but you got your moments. Moments of brilliance, even. You didn’t perform well on the tasks. But talking to you, I couldn’t tell why. I did a scan of your neural circuits.

  "Once I saw what was up, I was worried. I stewed over it for weeks. I didn’t know how to train someone like you. But the thing is, once I did the scan, it was in the company Beam. And that meant if somebody went snooping, they could find it. I just hoped nobody would bother. But somebody did: Jena’s dad found the scan, and then he had the best reason of all for putting the kibosh on you two."

  Davy remembered standing at her door, seeing her dad’s hand brighten in the info stream. It was at that moment that his neural scan was revealed. So her dad knew what he was before Davy himself. Amid all his troubles, that still had the power to rankle him.

  "It’s like this, Davy," Bertram said. "Your circuits, lots of ‘em, don’t work normal."

  "We knew that."

  "Shut up and listen. I mean really not normal. There’s two states a circuit can be in. On and off, yes?" After a pause, Bertram went on, "Well, you got a third state. An indeterminate state. It’s what makes you so unreliable in solving problems."

  But Davy was stuck a few sentences back. "A third state? How can that be?"

  "You’re asking me? Think I’d be a voc tech teacher if I could answer a question like that? I don’t even know how you can decide what to wear every morning, much less function in society. But I got this notion that you’re exploiting some unknown aspect of circuitry. You’re using your mutation, or whatever it is, to ask interesting questions."

  "But I don’t seem to have any interesting answers."

  "Maybe not yet. But you are surviving. All in a muddle, but surviving."

  Davy walked a few paces away, into a small clearing where a bit of sky showed through, filled with the tracery of beams, some invisible, some given definition by a random drift of haze. And he sucked in a breath, and renewed himself with the cool night air. He wasn’t dumb. Indecisive, yes, unproductive, maybe. But he had moments of brilliance. He knew the word for it now: intuition. Slow and unreliable, but it got you somewhere, eventually.

  Which is how he knew that Jena wasn’t baiting him tonight with her glittering eyes. Those were tears along her lids, reflecting light. He was so used to questioning himself that he couldn’t help but question Jena. But she was as true to him as they let her be.

  Bertram joined him in the clearing. "Here’s the deal, Davy. You gotta figure out what you want. Nobody else can tell you. Before I can help you, you gotta decide what you want." He cocked his head in the direction of the brightly lit house on the hill. "It can’t be Jena. She’s society’s child, boy. And you ain’t."

  As Bertram waited, Davy thought about what he did want. What he should want. Then he said, "I want to live."

  Bertram’s crooked smile flashed. "Now we’re cookin’" He nodded. "And what else do you want?"

  Davy paused. "I don’t know."

  Bertram was nodding and chuckling. "Yeah, not sure, are you? You’re in an in-de-term-inate state," he said, enjoying the sound of it, though Davy thought it was deadly serious.

  "Now," Bertram said, "now I can help you." He pointed down a ravine. "That’s the way we gotta go. Because if you want to live, you gotta leave the City. Capiche?"

  Davy nodded. He was willing to leave, but he still wasn’t sure why he had to. Low achievers weren’t a threat, and they could be prevented from mating. Yet Davy would have been wiped out in an instant on that Ferris wheel.

  They had gone only a few hundred feet when Bertram stopped and began digging through the leaves and dirt. "Help me, you damn fool."

  Davy joined him in scraping mud away from what appeared to be a metal plate. As Bertram pried it up with a stick, they got their fingers under it and heaved. A cold draft came from a well of darkness.

  "Sewer," Bertram said. "In you go."

  ~~~~~

  Bertram led the way, sloshing ankle-deep in liquid. "Good thing we gave up on the sense of smell a few generations ago."

  Davy followed, holding a light that Bertram had hidden here. "Why’s that?"

  "Nevermind. Some
things about humans are better off forgotten."

  They walked farther into the giant pipe. Bertram had uploaded the sewer layout of the entire City, and set a confident pace. Davy was content to let Bertram lead, so he could think. Questions came at him aslant, through the chinks of his training, perhaps through the half-way circuits of his mind. The kind of thoughts that he used to think feeble, now seemed profound. He let his mind wander, let his eyes look at moss-covered walls, and the dirty stream at their feet, all the while homing in on the reason he was a dead man in the City.

  "Hey, young pup," Bertram called from halfway up a ladder. "You comin’ or not?"

  In his reverie, Davy had walked right past Bertram. Following the old man, he climbed up the ladder rungs to a metal plate that covered the exit. Combining their strength, they heaved up to dislodge the plug.

  As they pushed the manhole cover aside, a thin gruel of light hit their eyes like an explosion. Bertram hoisted himself through, followed by Davy.

  They stood up, facing a dramatic horizon on every side. From their vantage point on a hill they saw a wild plain clad in dry grasses, gilded in the morning sun. In the distance was a rumpled spine of gray mountains.

  "The Dumb Lands," Bertram said. By his tone of voice, he didn’t much approve.

  "They say there’s all sorts of misfits out here. You aren’t the first to leave, you know. There’s maybe even some humans." Bertram shook his head. "Talk about a muddle ... ."

  But to Davy’s eyes the Dumb Lands were clean, mysterious, and beckoning. Jena had said, One of these days, I’m gonna raise up my wings and fly. Here was a landscape to soar in. He was saddened beyond measure to think that she never would.

  He turned to his friend. "Come with me, Bertram."

  Bertram squinted into the sun, then walked a few paces away, perhaps considering the offer. But it wasn’t long before he answered: "No, Davy. Sad to say, I don’t have the urge to start over." He looked back at Davy, as a few strands of his comb-over blew long in the breeze. "And I’m afraid."