The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  At some point our arguing and bitterness seemed to become the rule rather than the exception, and she left me. And a few weeks later she came back, both of us extravagantly tearful and contrite and swearing that we’d never fight again and blah blah blah. And we didn’t, until we did. So she moved out again, and came back again, and left again. How many times? A funny thing to lose track of.

  I do remember what triggered our last breakup, though. It was the thing with the animals. When the AIs decided to extend their reach into the realm of animals and nature, that was what finally and utterly ruined my marriage.

  As usual, the news crept in on us by degrees. First came the stories of some act of violence against an animal being prevented in one way or another. A deer hunter in Vermont found his 30-06 falling to pieces in his hands, just like the soldiers in the Fizzle War. A short-tempered dog owner in Egypt and a malicious slingshot-owning youngster in France were zapped onto their respective behinds. Soon the scattered reports became a deluge, and the meaning was clear: The AIs’ umbrella of protection had been spread to animals. All animals, everywhere. Harm to any creature larger than a bug was no longer allowed, and even wholesale attacks on insects were liable to bring down the stinging reprimand of a zap. Slaughterhouses around the world were disassembled to dust overnight, and the herds and flocks of livestock wandered off, to be fed and cared for by the machines. By this time, synthetic copies of every food imaginable had been available for years, and they’d been shown to be indistinguishable from their real-food counterparts. So this latest stricture had no real impact on anyone’s dining habits, but needless to say there were many who chafed under this imposition on their inalienable right to kill things. No matter. As ever and always, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  And then came the capstone on the AI’s new world: Reports from forests, jungles, and wildlife reserves began to show that it wasn’t just humans who were prohibited from harming animals. One early video showed a pride of lions stealthily closing in on a mother zebra and her foal. Then there was a series of flashes and crackles, and predator and prey darted off in opposite directions. That same afternoon, a drone on caterpillar treads was seen dropping off a load of realistic-looking but undoubtedly synthetic meat upwind of the lions. The lions ate well that night, and the zebra mother and her foal lived to see another sunrise. A thousand confirmations eventually followed, and soon after it was reported that the birthrate of all prey animals had dropped precipitously. The new rulers of the earth weren’t content to simply take a hand in the affairs of humans; they’d decided that nature itself needed some straightening out. So no longer would a mother zebra need to birth and rear 10 or 20 offspring so that one or two might live to reproductive age. No longer would nature be so profligate with lives, so red in tooth and claw. That bit about God’s eye being on the sparrow would no longer be a cruel joke at the sparrow’s expense as its life ended in agony and terror, with torn flesh and crushed bones. Now, in the remade world, that sparrow could look forward to a long and carefree life, a dignified old age, and a quiet death in its little sparrow bed, the whole of its time on earth innocent of pain and fear.

  * * *

  My mother died when I was 16. She was driving, and somehow managed to swerve off the road, hurtle down a steep embankment, and crash into a tree. I was sure I knew how it had happened—almost before I could even fathom the what of her being dead, I was sure of the how. She had seen something in the road, a squirrel or a cat, a turtle or a snake, and had yanked the wheel over to miss it. I was sure, and though we never mentioned it to each other, I felt my father had the same thought, and was just as sure.

  The idea of a funeral would have been anathema to my mother, but my father held a small “memorial gathering” for her in our home. It was one of those secular affairs where a succession of friends and relations stood and spoke. Many had reminiscences, some recited poetry or other texts. My father went last, and he started by noting that although his wife was the staunchest of atheists, she had a fondness for certain parts of the King James Bible. Then he read, very briefly, from Ecclesiastes:

  For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast.

  He spoke softly, as if his words weren’t intended so much for the people in the room as for himself, or for some closely-hovering spirit of my mother—though she would surely have been as disdainful of that image as she would have been for a traditional religious funeral.

  I imagine everyone likes to think that they aren’t fettered by their parents’ beliefs. Even while she was alive, I made little rebellions against my mother’s militant veganism. I would spend my allowance on sneaky little violations of the diet she’d raised me under. With all the furtive subterfuge that other kids invested on illicit drugs, I bought ice cream and pizza with real cheese, I ate snack foods without checking the ingredients list. And in my teens and adulthood I abandoned one after another of her strictures. I wore leather shoes, I stopped checking for “cruelty free” labels, I even nibbled at an occasional hotdog. I thought I was freeing myself from my mother’s irrationality, that I was growing up, becoming my own person.

  * * *

  “This really tears it, doesn’t it?” Lisa said. “This just wraps it up for you.” She was standing behind me, and we were watching the news of the AIs’ latest doings on our wall screen. At that moment the screen was showing a picture of a female mallard duck swimming on a sun-lit pond, followed by a single fluffy duckling.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I honestly had no idea, but the anger in her voice was making my own anger flare up. It felt like we’d leapt into the middle of another argument, with no preamble or warm-up.

  “I mean that this is where you find your god.” She waved an arm at the wall-screen. “This is him, or it, or them, climbing up onto his golden throne.” She made the same arm-wave in my direction. “And this is you, getting ready to kneel and worship at his feet.”

  “Damnit, Lisa, I’m not worshiping—”

  “And this is me, being a monster,” she interrupted. “A fucking monster who cares more about her own right to have a baby than she cares about war and disease and poverty and…” She waved her arm once more, this time hitting the screen with the back of her hand, “and a million, billion fucking baby ducklings being born just so they can be eaten by foxes or crocodiles or whatever the fuck eats baby ducklings!” Her voice became choked and strangled, and she pressed her forehead to the screen, banging it with her fist. “I’d let them all die! I’d let the world burn, so long as I can have my baby! Doesn’t that make me a monster? Doesn’t it?” She turned to me, her face twisted and smeared with tears.

  The anger melted out of me, replaced by a sense of hopelessness that wasn’t much of an improvement. “You’re not a monster, and you don’t feel that. You don’t want anyone or anything to die. You just want to have a baby, and so do I, and we have a right to want that. But…”

  “But everything’s for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. You believe that, don’t you? Especially now—now that the machines are fucking with nature, now that they’re so moral and righteous and holy that they’re saving little birdies and mousies and zebras and whatever the hell else from getting eaten. It used to be a joke when people talked about them being the new god. But now … now they really are god. The best god ever, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you believe?”

  That damn duckling picture was still on the screen, and I couldn’t help looking at it. “It matters, Lisa. There’s so much less pain and misery in the world now that I can’t even get my mind around it, and that matters. I’m not about to get down on my knees and pray to the machines, but … it matters. It matters a lot.”

  Lisa turned her back to the wall then, slowly bending her knees until she was sitting on the floor. She looked beaten, as if all the fight had been burned
out of her. “It matters more than our baby, you mean,” she said flatly. “And yeah, how can I argue? I can’t say that we should go back to the way things were, bring back all the war and disease and shit. I can’t say I want the world to burn. I can’t even say bring back the slaughterhouses and little birds getting eaten.” She turned her head to look at me, her face slack and infinitely weary. “But I can say one thing. I can say that I hate them. I hate them for treating the human race like it was their property. I hate them for making us into something less than human. And most of all I hate them for telling me that I’m not good enough to be a mother.” She made a dry, humorless laugh. “People in the old days didn’t know how good they had it. Back then, if you didn’t like the way God was running the world, you could just stop believing in the old bastard. You didn’t have to go through life being angry at him, hating him, wishing he’d get his fucking hands off of your life.”

  I didn’t say it, but I knew she was wrong about that. My mother didn’t believe in God, and yet she hated him with a boundless ferocity. She hated the blood-soaked cruelty of nature as if it was an animate thing, and what other name is there for that animate thing if not God? And despite my attempts to be free of her, to be my own person, I was still my mother’s son. Her hatred of the old God was still a part of me. So now, with this latest act of the machines—this remaking of the world of nature, this act of compassion, of tenderness for all the creatures of the world, I found it impossible not to feel something like love for them.

  So Lisa left me, for good and all, this time. There was just too much distance between us. “Irreconcilable differences,” as they used to say in court. We were simply lost to each other. I can remember every detail of her face and body, every nuance of expression and every habit of gesture. And yet when I visualize her I see her as a dim, far-off figure, obscured by misty distance, separated from me by a bottomless chasm.

  * * *

  The birds were chirping hello to another day when I left Ivan’s and weaved my way upstairs. I was debating whether to make some coffee or just drop into bed when I saw there was a message waiting for me on my screen. It was from Gwen, one of the people who works—or maybe a better term would be hangs out—as voluntary caretaker of the workshop where I get my sculptures scanned, enlarged, and 3-D printed as faux-bronze polymer.

  Hey James,

  Our ’bot buddies just delivered a new printer. They also built a whole new wing to the building here to hold it, because this sucker is big. Like, printing out sculptures 10 meters tall and 5×5 meters footprint. Nobody asked for this beast, of course, it just appeared overnight, the way things do.

  Also, some new equipment and spec files showed up at the same time. They’re instructions and materials for attaching big things to the exterior walls of buildings, even glass-walled buildings like the Hancock tower.

  So the other folks here were scratching their heads wondering what’s up with this and what we can do with it, but not me. My thoughts went straight to your piece Geckos, of which you sent us some pics of your clay original a few weeks back, asking if we had any ideas about where you might do an installation of a life-size copy. You’ll maybe remember that I wrote you back saying that I thought this was a really great piece, and it deserved as big and noteworthy an installation as we could manage. Well, how about a five times life size copy, dude? You could put those figures 10 or 20 stories up on the side of the Hancock tower! Is that an awesome thought or what? We all figure this must be exactly what the AIs have in mind. Nobody else around here has been talking about sticking anything big onto the outside wall of a building, so this delivery has got to be their way of giving you the go-ahead to do the biggest- and coolest-ass sculpture installation this town has seen since, well, forever.

  Get back to us quick, dude, or just show up with your clay original. All of us here are really jazzed about firing up this big printer and making this project happen.

  Yrs. etc.,

  Gwen

  I sat staring at the text on the screen for a long time, waiting. Waiting for the good feeling this news should have given me. It didn’t come. It didn’t come, and it kept on not coming. I got up and pulled the dust cover off of the two clay figures that were Geckos. A crazy obsession of a piece; one that I had kept working on, giving up on, trashing and restarting, rethinking and un-rethinking, over the past four years. I’d finished plenty of other work, but this was my Big One. It’s no Guernica, no Nude Descending a Staircase, no Balzac, but it’s as close to all of that as I expected I’d ever get. It was the best thing I’d ever done. It had as much of me in it as I could tear out through my skin. It had my blood and sweat and everything I knew about what’s beautiful and true in it. It had my love of Lisa in it, and her love for me.

  I visualized the whole installation project to come. There would be six or eight volunteers from the fabrication shop; Gwen, José and Steve, maybe Philipa and her latest partner, probably some others whose names I don’t know. There would be the cheerful camaraderie, the enthusiasm of working on a nifty new project. The specs and equipment the AIs had provided would be pondered and discussed carefully in advance, and then we’d set off to the site and do whatever it was we were supposed to do. Set up a scaffold, or run cables from a window or whatever. The project would take a while, maybe a few days. And when it was done we’d all look up at it, a big, conspicuous sculpture, visible for miles around, with my name attached to it. The crew of volunteers would grin and pop open beers and congratulate me, still breathless from their exertions.

  And it was all a crock of shit. If the machines wanted that sculpture expanded to five times life size and stuck onto the side of the Hancock tower, they could do it themselves. In hours, maybe minutes or seconds, they could use their nano-assembly trick to make it materialize in place, no human participation required. No camaraderie, no good friends toiling happily together. All of that was crap. It was just their way of putting some stupid humans onto a hamster wheel, running from nowhere to nowhere as fast as their stupid little legs could go.

  “Fuck you,” I said, talking to the empty room, to the room that would have been empty if there were any such thing as an empty room in the world today. “Fuck you. You can go to hell.” I went to the cabinet where I kept my stone-cutting tools and pawed through it until I found the heaviest mallet. “You can all go straight to hell,” I said to them, to them, them, them, as the room got blurry through my tears.

  * * *

  There’s something I never told Lisa. Because it was silly and goofy, and because it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because I was afraid she’d laugh at me with that cruel, barbed laugh she used when she was angry enough. It’s this: I have seen our child. She doesn’t exist and she never will, but I’ve seen her. She comes to me like a ghost. Standing in a doorway and looking in at me, sitting on a sunlit patch of grass in a park, looking out a window at the huge world that waits for her. I see her as she would be, not yet three years old, all toddling legs and chubby arms; tiny, gentle fingers. I see her eyes looking at me; wonderful eyes that are too wise and too full of no bullshit for a kid her age, and yet innocent. They’re eyes that haven’t known pain, aren’t even sure that pain is a real thing in the world, and yet belie enough strength to endure pain when it comes. They’re eyes that are open wide to the whole world, ready for all of it. I see our child; I see her as all the best parts of Lisa and all the best parts of me embodied, walking around, breathing and living. And it rips my fucking heart out every time I see her.

  * * *

  I took the mallet back to where the two clay figures of Geckos were standing on their low plinth, and lifted it up over my head, my arm already tasting the long swing downward, the thudding impact on soft clay. “You can all go to—”

  I was sitting on the floor, my back to the studio wall. The mallet lay on the floor beside me, near my right hand. A hand that seemed disconnected from me; that only made a vague twitch when I told it to move. As my mind slowly cleared, I became awar
e of a buzzing, numbing pain through my whole right arm. The bleachy smell of ozone was in the air.

  The two figures of Geckos were in front of me, but for a few seconds I resisted the urge to lift my eyes to look at them. When I did, I was looking up at my sculpture, unharmed, un-bludgeoned, not smashed into an amorphous lump. I let out a long, shaky breath.

  A motion caught my eye. One of the little insect-sized bots was crawling up the wall on my right. Probably it was one of the team I’d seen in Ivan’s studio, busily engaged in repairing the building’s exterior woodwork. It paused in its climb as I watched it, as if it was looking back at me. How much like a bee it was, I thought, busily going about its little bee life. At that moment the bot flexed itself in an odd way, seeming to expand a little and then shrink again, as if taking a breath. Then it continued up the wall, disappearing into a crack under the frame of a window.

  “All right then,” I said, climbing to my feet, flexing life and sensation back into my right arm. “Okay.”

  Mika Model

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI

  Paolo Bacigalupi made his first sale in 1998, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, took a break from the genre for several years, and then returned to it in the new century, with new sales to F&SF, Asimov’s, and Fast Forward II. His story “The Calorie Man” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and his acclaimed first novel The Windup Girl won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other novels include Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, The Doubt Factory, and Zombie Baseball Beatdown. His most recent book is a new novel, The Water Knife. His short work has been collected in Pump Six and Other Stories. Bacigalupi lives with family in Paonia, Colorado.