The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I think I do.” She looked up at him. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just—well, maybe I don’t trust people very easily.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “People leave. People forget. People stop caring.” She lay down on the couch, resting her head on the padded arm. “I think that the most frightening thing someone can say is ‘I’ll always love you.’ I just don’t believe in always, I guess. That’s why I gave you such a hard time when you said you’d always be around if I needed you. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  “You can trust me,” he said. “I won’t leave, and I won’t forget unless you tell me to. I won’t stop caring. It’s the way I am.”

  She watched his face through half-closed eyes. “All right,” she said at last. “Maybe I believe you.” She closed her eyes.

  “Would you like me to turn down the lights and read to you again?” Ian asked. “Maybe another Sandburg poem?”

  “That would be great.” She fell asleep on the couch to the sound of Ian’s voice.

  * * *

  Teresa woke to the incessant ringing of the telephone. “Do you want me to answer that?” Ian asked from the living room screen. Her head ached, the inevitable consequence of too much red wine.

  “I’ll get it,” she muttered, sitting up and pushing back a blanket. She had fallen asleep on the couch; Jeff must have covered her with the blanket at some point in the night. The realization bothered her. She stumbled to the phone and hit the answer switch.

  Jeff’s face appeared on the screen. “Good morning,” he greeted her tentatively. “How are you doing?”

  Feeling rumpled and half-awake, Teresa rubbed her eyes. “I can’t tell yet. Ask me after I’ve had my coffee.”

  “Sorry I woke you.” He hesitated. “I wish I’d gotten home earlier, so we could have spent some time together.”

  She tried to let him off the hook. He was, in his own way, asking for forgiveness. “I was tired too.”

  He studied her face. “You … uh … you got up late last night.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was afraid that I’d wake you up with all my tossing and turning. Figured we’d both be better off if I slept out here. That’s all.” His question made her feel guilty, and she tried to shake the feeling. “I guess I was still thinking about the sculpture.”

  “Yeah? Did you make some progress yesterday?”

  “I think so.” She pushed her hair back out of her face. “I think I’ve got an inspired idea, but it could just be fairy gold. I won’t know for sure until I listen to the results of yesterday’s work. You know how that goes.”

  “I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to you about this piece,” he said.

  He stopped in midsentence, interrupted by the sound of someone knocking on his office door. He glanced off-screen, responding to someone she couldn’t see. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “Brian wanted me to ask you a few more questions about how it’s going with the system. He said that we spent so much time on technical stuff at lunch that he didn’t get any idea how you felt about the system. And after all, you’re our first test user.”

  She leaned back in her chair, feeling let down. “It’s going just fine,” she said flatly. “No problems that I can think of.”

  Jeff leaned forward in his chair. He had, she thought, completely forgotten her own work, and she felt a little resentful. “So you’re finding the system useful?”

  “Sure, Ian’s real helpful.”

  “Could you tell me how you’ve been using the system?”

  She hesitated. Ian reads me love poetry when you’re out late, she thought. “Ian makes coffee,” she said. “Answers the phone and tells salesmen to go to hell. He’s helped me find some sounds I needed for the piece I’m working on.” She stopped, not wanting to admit that she just enjoyed chatting with Ian over coffee. Not while Jeff kept calling him “the system.”

  “So the system—” he began.

  “Ian,” Teresa corrected him.

  “What?”

  “Call him Ian,” she said. “It sounds weird to keep saying ‘the system.’”

  “So you think of it as Ian now? That’s great.”

  She looked down at her hands, feeling foolish. “Well, he acts just like a person. It doesn’t seem right not to treat him like a person.” She glanced at Jeff’s face. “Back when I erased his memories, I’d swear he had feelings about it. He seemed worried that he might have done something wrong.”

  Jeff grinned. “That’s perfect. The whole team will be excited.”

  “But I don’t understand. Does he have feelings or not?”

  “Of course not.” Jeff was talking fast now, unable to contain himself. “But you were convinced that it did. It’s that illusion that we want. The system responds to you, adapting and reshaping itself, learning to react in a way that pleases you. And to you, that response makes it seem that the system has feelings.”

  “Ian,” she corrected him softly.

  “What?”

  “It seems like Ian has feelings,” she said.

  “Right—Ian. This is great, Teresa.” She heard another knock at his door, and he glanced away.

  “Come on, Jeff,” someone said off-screen. “We can’t get started without you.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” He turned back to her. “Look, I’ve got to run now. I’ll really try to get out of here at a reasonable hour today.”

  “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep,” she said, but he was already turning away from the screen, and he didn’t seem to hear her. The screen went blank.

  “The whole team will be excited, Ian,” Teresa said to the living room.

  “Excited about what, Teresa?”

  “Excited that you and I are getting along.”

  “I’m glad we’re getting along,” Ian said.

  She studied Ian’s face on the screen. Just a program, she thought. A set of preconditioned responses. Then she shook her head. It didn’t matter. “So am I, Ian. So am I.”

  * * *

  When Jeff came home from work that day, she was busy at her workbench, cutting dozens of round metal plates from a sheet of steel. She didn’t stop work when he arrived. She told herself she wanted to get the metal cut so she’d be ready to go tomorrow morning. Besides, he didn’t stop his work at her convenience—why should she stop her work at his? She joined him for dinner, then immediately got back to work. For once, he was in bed before her. After she finished cutting the plates, she sat on the couch to talk to Ian about the sculpture, and she ended up falling asleep out there. Jeff was gone before she woke up the next morning.

  Over the next two weeks, she fell into a new routine. She woke each morning to Ian’s voice, reminding her that she had asked him to wake her. Over toast and coffee, she chatted with him. He always asked about her work, and when she answered, he was a good listener.

  She found that she didn’t mind as much when Jeff retired to his office right after dinner. Her attention was on the sculpture, and she had Ian for company. Whenever Jeff worked late, she fell asleep on the couch, talking to Ian. Somehow, she preferred the couch to the bed—the bed belonged to both her and Jeff, but the couch seemed like neutral territory.

  She made steady progress on the sculpture. Below the trigger point, where the first ball released two more, she placed the round metal plates, each one carefully tuned to provide just the right tone. When three balls were rolling down the tracks, the sound of scattered raindrops grew to a steady patter, the drumming of rain on dry soil. When the three balls released six more and the six released twelve, the drumming intensified, filling the studio.

  It wasn’t until she reached the part of the storm where the thunder should sound that she hit a snag. She started sorting through her materials, searching for inspiration.

  Two hours later, she was still looking. She had tried rolling the balls over corrugated metal that she
bent into chutes of various configurations, but nothing produced the thunder she had in mind.

  She asked Ian to play the rainstorm for her again, and after he obliged, she shook her head. “The first part sounds fine,” she muttered. “But how the hell am I going to get that thunder right?” She stared at the racks of shiny metal and pipe. “Everything here is so new, so lifeless. None of it has ever been anything, done anything. I need things that talk to me, that have their own ideas.”

  “Their own ideas?” Ian asked.

  “You know—junk that suggests things. I used to get half my material from scrap yards. Old pay phones that looked like goofy faces, vise grips that looked like robot hands, that kind of thing.”

  “You know,” Ian said gently, “there’s a scrap metal yard just east of Winslow. I have its address from the phone book.”

  “That’s not a bad idea, Ian. Maybe I should check it out. What was that address?”

  * * *

  When she stepped from the house, the warm air enveloped her in an unwelcome embrace. The sky overhead was a relentless blue. Her Toyota’s air-conditioning barely coped with the heat, blowing cool, damp-smelling air on her arms and face while she watched the needle of the heat sensor climb toward red.

  Still, the scrap yard was just what she needed. She spent three hours rooting through barrels of scrap in a hot warehouse. She filled a box with lengths of pipe, sheets of rusted corrugated metal, gears, and unidentifiable machine parts. Her best find was a barrel of hollow brass forms that were shaped like hands. According to the owner of the scrap yard, the forms had once been used in the manufacturing of rubber gloves. Over the years, they had tarnished so that the smooth brass was mottled with dark brown and black. The tarnish made patterns that looked organic, like the cracks in dry mud or the tracery of veins on the underside of a leaf.

  With the box of scrap in the trunk of her Toyota, she hurried home. By sunset, she had incorporated four of the brass hands into the sculpture. She flung open the door that led to the living room and called out to Ian for the first time since she had left the house. “Listen to this!”

  She pulled the release, and the first ball began the gentle patter of rain. The other balls joined it, and the sprinkle grew to a deluge as the balls clacked against metal plates. They rolled down to where the brass hands were carefully positioned on a pivoting mechanism. While some of the balls continued the drumming of the rain, a dozen rushed down a chute to tumble into the hollow hands, clattering through the palms into the fingers. Unbalanced by the impact of the balls, the hands gracefully upended, rattling their stiff fingertips against a sheet of tin and causing it to wobble. The hands dumped the balls onto a down-sloping curve of corrugated metal. Free of the weight of the balls, the hands swiveled back to their upright position, striking the tin again on their return trip. The wobbling of the tin and the rattling of the balls against the metal ridges blended into a deep-throated growl like thunder.

  The balls missed the catching bucket, hit the floor, and rolled in all directions, but Teresa didn’t chase them. She grinned at Ian. “What do you think?”

  Ian smiled back. “I can see the reviews now. Teresa King’s innovative use of brass hands is unique in the—’”

  “What? Where did you learn that critical bullshit?”

  “It was easy. ‘Innovative’ and ‘unique’ are two of the most common adjectives in art criticism. Besides, they do seem to fit your sculpture.”

  “Well, I think you’ve been reading too much art criticism in that library of yours,” she said, but she was still grinning as she got back to work.

  * * *

  A few days later, night was washing over the house as Teresa listened to the sculpture’s music. The rainstorm worked fine, and the thunder entered on cue, a close approximation of the sound she wanted. But she wasn’t quite satisfied with the next passage, the burst of wild rain that followed the crash of thunder. For most of the afternoon, she had been arranging and rearranging the tracks. She had used corrugated tracks to provide staccato bursts, and dozens of metal plates against which the balls rattled. It was a tricky business, looping one track over another, carefully setting the slope of each one. She was listening to her latest effort when the telephone rang.

  “Ian! Could you answer the phone and take a message? I don’t want to stop right now.”

  In the middle of the third ring, the phone fell silent, and Teresa continued working. After a few hours of work, the section finally produced the sound she wanted: thousands of tiny rattles and taps that joined to fill the studio with a rush of noise. At that point, she stopped.

  As she was checking in the freezer to see what she could thaw for dinner and telling Ian about her success so far, she remembered the phone call. “Who was that on the phone a few hours ago?” she asked.

  “A woman named Carla, from San Francisco.”

  “Carla?” She hadn’t heard from Carla since her last letter, almost two weeks before. “What did she have to say for herself?”

  “I recorded the conversation for you. Would you like me to play it back?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Ian’s face disappeared from the monitor, and a line appeared down the screen’s middle. Teresa heard the phone ring; Ian’s face appeared to the left of the line, Carla’s to the right.

  “Hello,” Ian said. “Can I help you?”

  Carla smiled, and Teresa knew that Ian had piqued her interest. “I hope so.” Teresa almost laughed; Carla must have broken up with her latest lover. “Is Teresa in?”

  “Yes, but she’s working and asked me not to disturb her. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Just tell her Carla called. No, on second thought, tell her that we’re having a party out at the Headlands to welcome a new batch of artists. I’d love it if she could make it.”

  “I’ll give her the message. Does she have your telephone number?”

  “After all the time I’ve known her, I certainly hope so.”

  “Then I’ll give her the message. Thanks for calling, Carla.”

  “Thank you.” Carla smiled again. Teresa had seen that smile many times before. It rarely failed. “I don’t suppose you’d like to come out for the party? The more the merrier.”

  “I don’t think that would be possible.”

  “Too bad,” Carla said. “Well, if you change your mind, Teresa has my number. Bye now.” Carla vanished from the screen and Ian’s face filled it once again.

  Teresa laughed. “Carla never changes.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ian said.

  “She was flirting with you,” Teresa said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, come on, Ian. She invited you to the party because she thinks you’re cute. She wanted you to smile and flirt back a little.”

  “How do you flirt?”

  “I don’t know. You smile, you tell jokes, you talk about this and that. It’s not so much what you say, it’s what’s going on under the surface that really matters.”

  “When you and I joke, are we flirting?”

  Teresa hesitated for a moment, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. “I guess maybe sometimes we are. Sometimes, I guess I forget that you’re a … that you’re just a…” She couldn’t find the right word.

  “An artificial intelligence,” Ian said.

  “Yeah. I guess I—I think of you as a friend, Ian. Sometimes people flirt with their friends.”

  “I understand. I’m glad we’re friends.”

  “Yeah.” She studied his face, looking for flaws in the animation. She found none. She had grown used to seeing him as a person, and she could see him no other way. That was what Jeff had wanted. “Look—I’d better give Carla a call.”

  She dialed Carla and her friend answered on the fourth ring. Carla was wearing an old purple sweatshirt and sitting in a white wicker chair. Before Teresa could say anything, Carla was talking.

  “Well, I was wondering when you’d call back. So, who was that guy wh
o answered the phone?”

  Teresa considered telling Carla the truth, but she somehow didn’t want to explain Ian. “That’s Ian. He’s a friend of Jeffs. He’s taking care of stuff around the house while I work on that piece for Santa Fe. The deadline’s coming up, you know.”

  “A friend of Jeff’s, huh.”

  “Yeah—and a friend of mine.”

  Carla shook her head. “Jeff’s a trusting soul.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leaving you alone with Ian all day?” Carla shook her head. “He’s the type that’ll steal your heart, all right.”

  Teresa shook her head. The conversation made her uncomfortable. “Not Ian.”

  “What, is he gay or something?”

  She shook her head again. “No, just”—she considered the word carefully—“unavailable. Besides, I just got back from my honeymoon, and—”

  “—and Jeff is working late every night,” Carla interrupted. “You sounded pretty miserable in your last letter. No offense, Teresa, but it was grim. And face it—Ian’s just your type. I can recognize ’em a mile off. More your type than Jeff is.”

  “Hey, I’m a married woman now.”

  “You’re married, but you’re not dead. And Ian’s awfully cute.”

  Teresa knew that Carla was giving her the chance to complain about Jeff and talk about Ian, but she ignored the bait. She wanted Carla to drop the subject. “Things weren’t going very well on the sculpture when I sent that last letter. It’s going better now.”

  “Is Jeff home yet?”

  “No, he’s still at work. They’re in some crucial phase of the project, and he hasn’t been around much lately.”

  “And you don’t mind that?”

  “Not really.” Teresa realized that, for the first time in a while, she wasn’t upset when Jeff stayed late at work. It wasn’t like she was alone all the time.

  Carla stared at Teresa in a moment of rare silence. Then she said, “So—are you coming out here for the party?”

  “I’d like to, but I don’t know if Jeff can spare the time.”

  “Come without him then. Fly in for the weekend—you deserve some time off. Come out and stay with me.”