The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties he’s on the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?”

  “Cats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old laser-pointer trick.”

  Manfred stares at her, hard. “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.”

  “Thirty million dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s lifetime nursing home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”

  Franklin leans back, keeping out of the crossfire.

  “The lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: the kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous: they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”

  “But they’re only uploads.” Pamela looks uncertain.

  “So? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. What’s your point?”

  Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”

  “No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for space-craft this morning, it’s logged on Eternity, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment or the whole thing’s off.”

  “But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for god’s sake!”

  Manfred’s finger jabs out: “that’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land-grab just shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “Lobsters—” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You’re serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?”

  “It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren’t treated as people it’s quite possible that other uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of ‘em’s thinking about the legal status of the uploadee. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years time?”

  Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. “How much is this worth?” she asks plaintively.

  “Oh, quite a few billion, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass. “Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining complex?”

  “They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think! You’ll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group—one that won’t be a minority for much longer.”

  That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred’s hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike heels and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents: she abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed-frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescing genitals—no point in letting him climax—clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles: she resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There’s other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room’s 3D printer.

  Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn’t just sex, after all: it’s a work of art.

  After a moment’s thought she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He’s twisting and straining, testing the cuffs: tough, it’s about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she’s about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: it’s the first time she’s been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear: “Manfred. Can you hear me?”

  He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued: good. No back channels. He’s powerless.

  “This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?”

  He’s trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge this winter; soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.

  “Twelve million in tax, baby, that’s what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe me? That’s six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn’t going into your virtual children’s mouths.”

  He’s rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won’t do: she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. “Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?” He’s cringing, unsure whether she’s serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.

  There’s no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. “Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You’re not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot.” She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it’s stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expected, and then the sensation is utterly different from what she’s used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can’t control herself: she almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device.

  She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don’t
produce seminiferous plugs, and although she’s fertile she wants to be absolutely sure: the glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, now she’s nailed him down at last.

  When she removes his glasses his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. “You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast,” she whispers in his ear: “otherwise my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later.”

  He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag: kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, then looks away. “Why? Why do it this way?”

  She taps him on the chest: “property rights.” She pauses for a moment’s thought: there’s a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. “You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart matter singularity you’re busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a few months I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content.”

  “But you didn’t need to do it this way—”

  “Didn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff: puts the bottle conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.

  “See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”

  She’s in the doorway when he calls: “but you didn’t say why!”

  “Think of it as spreading your memes around,” she says; blows a kiss at him and closes the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

  Breathmoss

  * * *

  IRA R. MACLEOD

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the ’90s, and, as we travel into the new century ahead, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity. MacLeod has published a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various “Best of the Year” anthologies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different “Best of the Year” anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. His stories have appeared in our Eighth through Thirteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth annual collections. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published to critical acclaim in 1997, followed by a collection of his short work, Voyages by Starlight. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella “The Summer Isles,” and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl.” His most recent book is a major new novel, The Light Ages—which finally seems to be garnering MacLeod some of the wide audiences he so richly deserves—and a new collection, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations. Coming up is the sequel to The Light Ages. MacLeod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England, and is at work on several new novels.

  Here—in a story that was both a Nebula and Hugo finalist—he takes us across the galaxy and thousands of years into the far-future, for the intimate story of a child growing into a woman that is also a generation-spanning epic tale of love, loss, tragedy, and redemption, played out against the backdrop of a world as rich, layered, evocative, and luminously strange as any the genre has seen since Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

  1.

  In her twelfth standard year, which on Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the coast. For all of them, the journey down was one of unhurried discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly moist, and the hayawans rusting as they rode them, and the huge flat plates of their feet swishing through purplish-green undergrowth. She saw the cliffs and qasrs she’d only visited from her dreamtent, and sailed across the high ridges on ropewalks her distant ancestors had built, which had seemed frail and antique to her in her worried imaginings, but were in fact strong and subtle; huge dripping gantries heaving from the mist like wise giants, softly humming, and welcoming her and her hayawan, whom she called Robin, in cocoons of effortless embrace. Swaying over the drop beyond into grey-green nothing was almost like flying.

  The strangest thing of all in this journey of discoveries was that the landscape actually seemed to rise higher as they descended and encamped and descended again; the sense of up increased, rather than that of down. The air on the high plains of Tabuthal was rarefied—Jalila knew that from her lessons in her dreamtent; they were so close to the stars that Pavo had had to clap a mask over her race from the moment of her birth until the breathmoss was embedded in her lungs. And it had been clear up there, it was always clear, and it was pleasantly cold. The sun shone all day hard and cold and white from the blue blackness, as did a billion stars at night, although Jalila had never thought of those things as she ran amid the crystal trees and her mothers smiled at her and occasionally warned her that, one day, all of this would have to change.

  And now that day was upon her, and this landscape—as Robin, her hayawan, rounded the path through an urrearth forest of alien-looking trees with wrinkled brown trunks and soft green leaves, and the land fell away, and she caught her first glimpse of something far and flat on the horizon—had never seemed so high.

  Down on the coast, the mountains reared behind them and around a bay. There were many people here—not the vast numbers, perhaps, of Jalila’s dreamtent stories of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds, but so many that she was sure, as she first walked the streets of a town where the buildings huddled in ridiculous proximity, and tried not to stare at all the faces, that she would never know all their families.

  Because of its position at the edge of the mountains, the town was called Al Janb, and, to Jalila’s relief, their new haramlek was some distance away from it, up along a near-unnoticeable dirt track that meandered off from the blue-black serraplated coastal road. There was much to be done there by way of repair, after the long season that her bondmother Lya had left the place deserted. The walls were fused stone, but the structure of the roof had been mostly made from the stuff of the same strange urrearth trees that grew up the mountains, and in many places it had sagged and leaked and grown back toward the chaos that seemed to want to encompass everything here. The hayawans, too, needed much attention in their makeshift stables as they adapted to this new climate, and mother Pavo was long employed constructing the necessary potions to mend the bleeding bonds of rusty metal and flesh, and then to counteract the mold that grew like slow tears across their long, solemn faces. Jalila would normally have been in anguish to think of the sufferings that this new climate was visiting on Robin, but she was too busy feeling ill herself to care. Ridiculously, seeing as there was so much more oxygen to breathe in this rich coastal air, every lungful became a conscious effort, a dreadful physical lunge. Inhaling the damp, salty, spore-laden atmosphere was like sucking soup through a straw. She grew feverish for a while, and suffered the attentions of similar molds to those that were growing over Robin, yet in even more irritating and embarrassing places. More irritating still was the fact that Ananke her birthmother and Lya her bondmother—even Pavo, who was still busily attending to the hayawans—treated her discomforts and fevers with airy disregard. They had, they all assured her vaguely, suffered similarly in their own youths. And the weather would soon change in any case. To Jalila, who had spent all her life in the cool, unvarying glare of Tabuthal, where the wind only ever blew from one directi
on and the trees jingled like ice, that last statement might as well have been spoken in another language.

  If anything, Jalila was sure that she was getting worse. The rain drummed on what there was of the roof of their haramlek, and dripped down and pooled in the makeshift awnings, which burst in bucketloads down your neck if you bumped into them, and the mist drifted in from every direction through the paneless windows, and the mountains, most of the time, seemed to consist of cloud, or to have vanished entirely. She was coughing. Strange stuff was coming out on her hands, slippery and green as the slime that tried to grow everywhere here. One morning, she awoke, sure that part of her was bursting, and stumbled from her dreamtent and out through the scaffolding that had by then surrounded the haramlek, then barefoot down the mud track and across the quiet black road and down onto the beach, for no other reason than that she needed to escape.

  She stood gasping amid the rockpools, her hair lank and her skin feverishly itching. There was something at the back of her throat. There was something in her lungs. She was sure that it had taken root and was growing. Then she started coughing as she had never coughed before, and more of the greenstuff came splattering over her hands and down her chin. She doubled over. Huge lumps of it came showering out, strung with blood. If it hadn’t been mostly green, she’d have been sure that it was her lungs. She’d never imagined anything so agonizing. Finally, though, in heaves and starts and false dawns, the process dwindled. She wiped her hands on her night-dress. The rocks all around her were splattered green. It was breathmoss; the stuff that had sustained her on the high plains. And now look at it! Jalila took a slow, cautious breath. And then another. Her throat ached. Her head was throbbing. But still, the process was suddenly almost ridiculously easy. She picked her way back across the beach, up through the mists to her haramlek. Her mothers were eating breakfast. Jalila sat down with them, wordlessly, and started to eat.